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BUILDERS OF 
GREATER BRITAIN 

Edited by H. F. WILSON, M.A. 

Barrister -at-Law 

Late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge 

Legal Assistant at the Colonial Office 




DEDICATED BY SPECIAL 
PERMISSION TO HER 
MAJESTY THE QUEEN 



BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 



i. SIR WALTER RALEGH ; the British Dominion of 
the West. By Martin A. S. Hume. 

2. SIR THOMAS MAITLAND ; the Mastery of the 

Mediterranean. By Walter Frewen Lord. 

3. JOHN AND SEBASTIAN CABOT ; the Discovery of 

North America. By C. Raymond Beazley, M.A. 

4. EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD ; the Coloni- 

zation of South Australia and New Zealand. By 
R. Garnett, C.B., LL.D. 

5. LORD CLIVE; the Foundation of British Rule in 

India. By Sir A. J. Arbuthnot, K.C.S.I., CLE. 

6. RAJAH BROOKE ; the Englishman as Ruler of an 

Eastern State. By Sir Spenser St John, G.C.M.G. 

7. ADMIRAL PHILLIP ; the Founding of New South 

Wales. By Louis Becke and Walter Jeffery. 

8. SIR STAMFORD RAFFLES; England in the Fnr 

East. By the Editor. 



Builders 

of 



Greater Britain 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 



EDWARD GIBBON 
WAKEFIELD 

THE COLONIZATION OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA 
AND NEW ZEALAND 



•^ 



S 



BY 



R^GARNETT, C.B., LL.D. 



With Photogravure Frontispiece and Maps 







NEW YORK 
LONGMANS, GREEN & CO. 
91 and 93 FIFTH AVENUE 
1898 






. Transfer 

MAR 30 19, 



PREFACE 

Among all the men celebrated in this series 
of biographies as ' Builders of Greater Britain,' 
Edward Gibbon Wakefield, inferior to none 
in genius and achievement, is perhaps the 
only one whose inclusion could excite inquiry 
or surprise. Not that his claims have at any 
time been weighed and found wanting, but 
that their existence is unknown to the 
multitude. By the mass of his countrymen 
at home he is chiefly remembered by the 
one incident in his career which he would 
have wished to be forgotten. The historians 
of the colonies he founded in general pass 
him over with slight notice, some omitting 
his very name. 

If, however, judged merely by this popular 



xii PREFACE 

neglect, the name of Wakefield might seem 
one of those which the world is content to let 
die, it is far otherwise with students of the 
subject of colonization, to whose judgment 
popular opinion must ultimately conform. 

A complete view of Wakefield's activity 
as an Empire-builder has not, indeed, existed 
until the publication of this little bio- 
graphy. But it is impossible to read even the 
casual notices of such an authority as Mr 
Egerton, in his History of British Colonial 
Policy, without perceiving the high place 
accorded to Wakefield as a practical states- 
man, not merely a founder of colonies, but 
a reformer and transformer of the entire 
British colonial system. Indications of a 
similar feeling in authoritative quarters are 
continually transpiring — as, for instance, in a 
recent article in the Quarterly Review — and 
the biographer's problem is how to permeate 
the oblivious and indifferent general public 
with the knowledge and appreciation of the 
better informed. 

This is not a problem easy of solution, 
for, although Wakefield's biography is one of 
fascinating interest, it is a difficult one to 



PREFACE xiii 

write. Special obstacles will be brought to 
light by the story itself, but two capital ones 
may be mentioned here by way of preliminary 
apology for inevitable deficiencies. Most ex- 
tenders of the British Empire have been 
emphatically men of action. They have 
plunged into the thick of war, pestilence 
and famine ; have explored great unknown 
rivers, or defended beleaguered forts with 
handfuls of men. They have, at all events, 
planted the British flag where it never waved 
before, occasionally displacing some other to 
make room for it. Wakefield's work was 
not performed in this fashion. Though 
capable of vigorous action in emergencies, he 
wrought principally by the pen and by the 
tongue. His activity with both was pro- 
digious ; yet the former implement has left 
but inadequate traces of its employment, the 
latter none. Though living and breathing in 
an atmosphere of colony-making, he never 
saw a colony until his last days ; he headed 
no exploring expeditions, overthrew no antago- 
nists, except upon paper, and his battles were 
chiefly with the Colonial Office, Once, in 
Canada, he seemed to have a chance of letting 



xiv PREFACE 

his light shine before men, but the authorities 
promptly snuffed it out. That he should 
have brought this exclusion from conspicuous 
public life upon himself deepens the tragedy 
of his romantic career, and so far enhances 
its interest, but in no respect diminishes the 
biographer's difficulty in rendering this mainly 
subterranean activity visible and tangible. 

Where the public life is thus sequestered, 
and mainly traceable in its effects, it is doubly 
important that the details of private life should 
be copious and interesting. The mere thinker 
or writer, however illustrious, must remain 
much of an abstraction. No real biography 
of some of the world's greatest benefactors 
will ever be written, simply because il ny a 
pas de quoi. It is otherwise with Wakefield, 
a rich specimen of human nature, commonly 
admirable, sometimes condemnable, but ever 
potent, impassioned and dramatic. This much 
is clear even from the imperfect records of 
his political activity, but these greatly needed 
to be supplemented by traits derived from 
private life, and it might well have been that 
such would not have been procurable. Relying 
on the friendship and confidence of members 



PREFACE xv 

of Mr Wakefield's family, the present writer 
ventured upon a task of which more com- 
petent executors might conceivably have been 
found. His expectations have not been dis- 
appointed, and his obligations cannot be 
sufficiently expressed. Everything available 
has been placed at his disposal ; he has written 
free from constraint or suggestion of any kind ; 
and, though conscious of having done his 
utmost, he knows well that the best pages in 
his book are from the pens of Nina Wakefield 
and Alice Freeman. Yet, by no fault of 
Mr Wakefield's present representatives, there 
are imperfections in the record which demand 
apology, and this rather as they might other- 
wise be liable to misinterpretation. The 
reader, observing that long periods of Wake- 
field's life are devoid of any illustration 
from private letters, which afterwards on 
the sudden begin to be comparatively 
numerous, and as suddenly cease, might 
reasonably conclude that a rule of selection 
had been exercised, and that much had 
been omitted which it was deemed inex- 
pedient to publish. It is not so. The 
preservation or destruction of Wakefield's 



*vi PREFACE 

letters appears to have been a matter of 
mere accident. Many ought to exist in the 
hands of the representatives of Sir William 
Molesworth, Charles Buller, and others of 
his allies on colonial questions ; but it has, 
for the present, appeared useless to search 
out documents which there was neither time 
to collect nor space to employ. 

The reader on a subject so much passed cat 
of notice as the colonizing career of Edward 
Gibbon Wakefield, may not unreasonably ask 
for some assurance, beyond the word of the 
biographer, that his study will be repaid. 
Abundant evidence of the high position 
accorded to Wakefield by his contemporaries 
might be collected from the books and journals 
of his own day, but it is less troublesome to 
produce two unpublished testimonies, one re- 
ferring chiefly to the theoretical side of his 
work, the other to the practical. In reply, as 
would appear, to a letter from Wakefield, 
acknowledging the gift of his Political Economy 
(published in 1848), Stuart Mill writes : — 

' India House, Thursday. 
'My Dear Wakefield, — I am very glad 



PREFACE xvii 

that you think the public statement in my book 
of what is so justly due to you, both as a 
colonizer and a political economist, likely to be 
of use at this particular time. I am still more 
glad to hear that you are writing the book you 
speak of. I have long regretted that there does 
not exist a systematic treatise in a permanent 
form, from your hand and in your name, in 
which the whole subject of colonization is 
treated as the express subject of the book, so 
as to become at once the authoritative book on 
the subject. At present, people have to pick 
up your doctrines, both theoretical and practical. 
I cannot help urging you to complete the book 
with as much expedition as is consistent with 
the care due to your health, which your life is 
too valuable to permit any relaxation of. — Ever 
truly yours, J. S. Mill.' 

For Mill, doubtless, the chief interest lay in 
the Wakefield system of land sales and emigra- 
tion funds, the system which regulated emigra- 
tion and made it defray its cost, prevented it 
from running to waste over vast and indefinite 
areas, and provided that the flower and not the 
refuse of the old country should be transplanted 



xviii PREFACE 

to the new. Another and not less important 
aspect of his activity, the restoration of Imperial 
ideas and right relations between the mother 
country and the colonies through the agency of 
responsible government, is thus set forth in a 
letter to the author from almost the last survivor 
of Wakefield's associates, the venerable Lord 
Norton, who, at eighty-four, sets an example 
to younger men by a lively interest in what- 
ever concerns the common weal : — 

' Wakefield was a man of genius, and, circum- 
stances having shut him out of Parliament, 
where he would have risen to the top of the 
tree, he devoted himself to make ministers 
dance in his leading - strings. Under his 
auspices I, in company with others, founded 
" The Colonial Reform Society," by which our 
colonial policy was restored to its original un- 
rivalled success in the hiving out of English 
citizens. The disuniting from us of great 
colonies, owing to our infringement of the 
essential principles of their freedom, had led 
us to treat new colonies as dependencies, and 
misgovern them from London by way of keep- 
ing them tight. To Wakefield is due the chief 



PREFACE xix 

merit in restoring our colonial policy — to let 
colonies be extensions of England, with the 
same constitution as at home — only not re- 
presented in the House of Commons, because 
of the thousands of miles of sea to cross — 
with their own Parliaments on the spot and 
Governments responsible to them under the 
Queen's Viceroys, who connect them with her 
supremacy/ 

The man who has done this is assuredly a 
builder of the Empire, even a master-builder. 
Respecting Wakefield's personal character, the 
most profitable remark to be made seems to 
be that he is a conspicuous instance of the 
happy effect of public causes and wide views 
in ennobling man's nature. So long as he is 
intent upon private ends, a harsh critic might 
be warranted in terming him selfish and 
unprincipled, although even then displaying 
traits inconsistent with a low type of character. 
From the moment that he finds his work, and 
undertakes his mission, he becomes a memorable 
example of enthusiastic and mainly disinterested 
devotion to an idea, not indeed devoid of ad- 
vantage to himself, since, though producing no 



xx PREFACE 

brilliant pecuniary results, it took away the 
stain from his name, yet evidently followed 
for no such subsidiary end, but in the spirit 
of the creator, who must see of the travail of 
his soul that he may be satisfied. 

Another principal figure in this history being, 
according to the popular belief, unprovided with 
a soul, can view posthumous censure and vindi- 
cation with indifference. Even a corporation, 
however, has a claim to justice, and it is the 
writer's decided opinion that few persons and 
few institutions have been more unjustly treated 
than the New Zealand Company. That its 
precipitate proceedings occasioned much mis- 
chief and misfortune is certain, but it is equally 
certain that this precipitancy was forced upon 
it by the perverse malevolence of the Govern- 
ment. The part played by Government in 
the early history of New Zealand colonization 
is indeed a melancholy chapter in English 
history ; save for Lord John Russell's mag- 
nanimous admission of error, and his good 
intentions frustrated by a charge of adminis- 
tration. The main cause of the unpopularity 
of the New Zealand Company, however, seems 
to have been not so much the errors they 



PREFACE xxi 

were driven to commit as the imputation of 
designs remote from their intentions. They 
were looked upon as Jand-sharks, bent on de- 
priving the natives of their land, and some 
countenance was given to the charge by the 
extensive purchases by which their agent 
sought to protect New Zealand from a shoal 
of sharks from Australia. It is curious that 
their accusers are usually the persons who 
object most vehemently to property in land 
at all, or at least to the uncontrolled exercise 
of private rights over it, but who seem unable 
to perceive that if a white landowner has no 
moral right to reserve a barren moor for 
the pursuit of game, a brown landowner has 
still less to lock up a fertile territory for the 
pursuit of rats. Neither one nor the other, 
in fact, has a right to more land than he can 
use for the general good ; within these limits 
his title is impregnable ; but in Maori New 
Zealand these limits were exceedingly narrow. 
The New Zealand Company would have 
solved the problem by a plan for native re- 
serves, conceived in a spirit of fairness and 
philanthropy, but which they were not per- 
mitted to carry into effect. Not all their 



xxii PREFACE 

proceedings were equally laudable, but the 
only one which appears open to very serious 
animadversion occurred after Wakefield had 
ceased to be concerned in their affairs. 

The list of the author's obligations is long. 
He is, above all, indebted to members of Mr 
Wakefield's family, and among these princi- 
pally to three of his nieces — Miss Frances 
Torlesse, of Christchurch, N.Z., daughter of 
his favourite sister Catherine ; Mrs Harold 
Freeman, daughter of his brother Daniel ; and 
Mrs D'Arblay Burney, daughter of his brother 
Felix. But for Miss Torlesse, in particular, 
this work would never have been undertaken. 
The countenance of Mr Charles Marcus 
Wakefield, of Belmont, Uxbridge ; and of 
Mr Edward Wakefield, author of New 
Zealand after Fifty Tears, also demand ac- 
knowledgment. Two ladies more remotely 
connected with the family — Mrs Chapman, 
wife of Lieutenant-General Chapman, C.B., 
the officer commanding the Scottish division 
of the home forces ; and Miss A. M. Wake- 
field, of the Westmoreland branch, as great 
an organiser of music as her relative of 
colonization — have also been of material service 



PREFACE xxiii 

to the author. He is, further, deeply indebted 
to Mr Albert Allom, of Parnell, N.Z., and 
his sister Mrs Storr, the children of Wake- 
field's old and faithful friends, Mr and Mrs 
Allom. The value of Sir Frederick Young's 
written contribution speaks for itself, while 
he has courteously provided the daguerreotype 
from which the frontispiece is taken. The 
writer must cordially thank Mr Stuart J. 
Reid, now engaged in a biography of Lord 
Durham, for the communication of docu- 
ments illustrating Wakefield's connection with 
that nobleman. Lord Norton has been good 
enough to permit reference to be made to 
him respecting the New Zealand Constitution 
of 1852 ; and it has been a sincere gratifica- 
tion to the writer to find his account of 
John Robert Godley, Wakefield's coadjutor in 
the foundation of the Canterbury Settlement, 
approved by his son, Sir Arthur Godley, 
K.C.B., and his venerable widow, one of the 
original * Canterbury pilgrims.' Mr Atchley, 
librarian of the Colonial Office, and Mr 
Boose, librarian of the Royal Colonial Insti- 
tute, have kindly furnished documents from 
their respective libraries. The lamented illness 



xxiv PREFACE 

of Sir George Grey has deprived the author of 
assistance from him, but he has found a sym- 
pathetic, as well as judicious, counsellor in the 
Hon. W. Pember Reeves, Agent-General for 
New Zealand ; although he must not be con- 
sidered responsible for anything in the book. 

R. GARNETT. 
London, August id, 1898. 



PAGE 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER I 

Wakefield's Ancestry and Early Years — Westminster and 
Edinburgh Schools — Employment under Foreign Office 
— First Marriage — Death of His Wife — Diplomatic 
Post at Paris — Early Writings, i 

CHAPTER II 

The Turner Abduction — Wakefield's Trial — His Imprison- 
ment and Its Results — Letters from Gaol, . . 29 

CHAPTER III 

Wakefield's Early Writings — ' The Punishment of Death ' 
— ' Letter from Sydney ' — The Wakefield System — 
' England and America ' — Wakefield on the Agri- 
cultural Labourer, . . . . .50 

CHAPTER IV 

The Colonization Society — The Swan River Settlement — 
The Foundation of South Australia — The South 
Australian Commissioners — Mr G. F. Angas — Nina 
Wakefield — Her Death — Early Struggles of the 
Colony — Testimony to the Wakefield System, . . 84 

xxv d 



xxvi CONTENTS 

CHAPTER V 

PAGE 

Project for Colonization of New Zealand — Condition of 
the Islands in 1837 — The New Zealand Association — 
The Church Missionary Society — Lord Durham — Lord 
Howick — The New Zealand Company — Obstruction 
from the Government — First Expedition, . . 125 

CHAPTER VI 

Wakefield in Canada with Lord Durham in 1838 — Recall 
of the Mission — The Durham Report — Wakefield's 
Subsequent Visits to Canada, . . . .158 

CHAPTER VII 

The Planting of New Zealand — The Company's Instruc- 
tions to Its Agents — Colonel William Wakefield — 
His Land Purchases — Native Reserves — Treaty of 
Waitangi — Frustration of French Designs upon the 
Colony, . . 192 

CHAPTER VIII 

Settlement of Wellington — Ill-judged Proclamation of 
Governor Hobson — Auckland made the Seat of 
Government — The Company and the Colonial Office 
— Massacre of Wairau — Governors Fitzroy and Grey 
— Wakefield's Illness, . . . . .216 

CHAPTER IX 

The Transportation Committee — The Colonial Lands Com- 
mittee — The New Zealand Committees of 1840 and 
1844 — The New Zealand Company and Lord Stanley — 
Debates in the Commons — Wakefield and Adam Smith 
— Politics for the People, .... 234 



PAGE 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER X 

The Last Days of the New Zealand Company — John Robert 
Godley — Sir George Grey's Administration — Death of 
Colonel Wakefield — * The Art of Colonization ' — 
Criticism of M. Leroy-Beaulieu — Death of Charles 
Buller, ....... 267 

CHAPTER XI 

Church Colonization — The Free Church Colony at Otago 
— The Canterbury Settlement — Lord Lyttelton — 
Godley as Superintendent — Felix Wakefield on the 
Colony — The New Zealand Constitution — Life at 
Redhill and Reigate — Wakefield leaves England for 
New Zealand, ...... 297 

CHAPTER XII 

Wakefield in New Zealand — Sir George Grey — The First 
New Zealand Parliament — Illness and Retirement 
from Public Life — The Closing Scene — Estimate of His 
Work and Character, . . . . 336 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Portrait of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, from a 
Daguerreotype in the possession of Sir 
Frederick Young, K.C.M.G., . . Frontispiece 

Map of South Australia in 1837, . . To face page 92 

Map of New Zealand, 1837 (showing Progress 

of Settlement up to 1850), . . To face page 200 



Edward Gibbon Wakefield 



CHAPTER I 

Wakefield's ancestry and early years — west- 
minster AND EDINBURGH SCHOOLS EMPLOY- 
MENT UNDER FOREIGN OFFICE FIRST MARRIAGE 

DEATH OF HIS WIFE DIPLOMATIC POST AT 

PARIS EARLY WRITINGS 

The family of Wakefield belongs to the North 
country, and may well be supposed to have originated 
at the ancient Yorkshire town from which it derives 
its name. Those of the name who have achieved 
distinction, with the exception of Gilbert Wakefield, 
whose ancestors dwelt in Staffordshire, have never- 
theless been connected with the branch of the family 
established near Kendal, in Westmoreland, whose re- 
presentatives embraced Quakerism soon after its pro- 
mulgation in the middle of the seventeenth century. 
The profession and consistent maintenance of un- 
popular opinions, when not absolutely perverse or 
fanatical, is usually a token of moral strength, evincing 
independence of mind in the first instance, and tenacity 



2 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

of conviction in the second. Hence the influence of 
small nonconforming sects surviving through several 
generations, a choice remnant sifted by a slow, 
selective process from age to age, is out of all pro- 
portion to their numbers ; and much of this power 
and worth continue even with the families which have 
eventually relapsed into the general current, as has 
been the case with the majority of the Westmoreland 
Wakefields. 

Six miles west of Kendal, on the road to Bowness, 
stands or has stood a hamlet called Quakers' Meeting, 
whose sequestered situation seems to hint at conceal- 
ment necessitated by persecution. Six miles south of 
Kendal is the village of Preston Patrick, the home 
of Roger Wakefield, descended from another Roger 
Wakefield living at Challon Hall in 1592, but the 
earliest member of the family from whom the dili- 
gence of Mr Joseph Foster * can deduce a regular 
pedigree. In 1665 he married Hannah Preston of 
Farleton. 

We do not know whether the constancy of Roger 
and his wife was tested by a twenty-four miles' journey, 
going and returning, to a possibly silent meeting ; 
but the mere fact of his Quakerism in those days of 

1 The Royal Lineage of our Noble and Gentle Families, p. 846. It should 
be observed that royal descent is not claimed for Roger Wakefield, but 
for such of his posterity as can establish descent in the female line from 
Robert Barclay of Urie, whose mother, Catherine Gordon, was descended 
from Edward the First. It is remarkable that this descent could not 
have existed if one of the Gordons, Alexander, Roman Catholic Bishop 
of Galloway, had not become a Protestant and married. 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 3 

intolerance reveals him as a man of resolute conviction. 
His rank of life was that of c statesman,' or farmer 
holding and farming his own land. He lived to see 
better times, dying in 1724. His son Roger also 
lived and died at Preston Patrick, but the second 
Roger's second son, Edward, migrated to London, 
where he became a prosperous merchant, and by his 
second marriage (1748) with Isabella Gibbon, a distant 
relation of the historian, was the father of another 
Edward Wakefield, who conferred distinction on his 
family by his marriage (1771) with Priscilla Bell, 
great grand-daughter of Robert Barclay of Urie, 
author of the famous Apology, described by Mr 
Leslie Stephen as ' one of the most impressive theo- 
logical writings of the century.' 

Though inheriting a fortune from his father, this 
Edward Wakefield failed in business, and his descend- 
ants are unanimous in attributing their intellectual dis- 
tinction and especial bent towards public questions to 
inheritance from his wife. He is depicted with her and 
his sister-in-law, Catherine (afterwards Gurney), in a 
picture by Gainsborough, still in the possession of a de- 
scendant, painted in 1775, engraved as the frontispiece to 
Mr Augustus Hare's Gurneys of Earlham. He appears 
a handsome man, attired in a costume equally remote 
from foppishness and Quakerism, and presenting some 
resemblance to the portrait of Edward Gibbon Wake- 
field as a young man, engraved in 1826, and repro- 
duced in Mr Edward Wakefield's New Zealand 



4 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

after Fifty Tears. The animated features seem to 
bespeak ardour and resolution ; but if these qualities 
were ever exerted, no record of them remains. It is 
otherwise with his wife Priscilla, from 1794 to 181 7 
one of the most popular and useful contemporary 
writers for the young, but far more celebrated as 
one of the first to introduce the savings bank into 
England, under the name of the Frugality Bank. 
Some uncertainty exists respecting priority in the 
introduction of this great national boon ; certain it is 
from the Reports of the Society for bettering the Condition 
of the Poor, vol. i., that her Friendly Society was 
established on 22d October 1798, though it is not 
quite clear whether the Savings Bank was a feature 
of it from the first. Amiable, sensible, industrious, 
placid, affectionate, she was a model of Ouaker virtues, 
and a consistent Friend in religious practice, although 
she conformed to Quaker peculiarities neither in dress 
nor in abstinence from amusements. c I suppose,' says 
her son, ' no one can relate having seen her in a 
passion or out of humour.' During her long widow- 
hood she resided successively at Tottenham and Ipswich, 
where she died in September 1832. 

Her two sons, Edward, born 1774, and Daniel, 
born 1776, displayed the interest in public questions, 
and the disposition to occupy themselves with in- 
dustrial and philanthropic projects, which she appears 
to have introduced into the family, as well as other 
traits for which she probably was not responsible. It 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 5 

will abundantly appear in the course of this history 
that the Wakefield family possessed a fine irregular 
genius for marriage, and one characteristic of their 
unions was precocity. The first and second Edward 
had each married at twenty-one ; the third broke the 
record by espousing Susanna Crash, daughter of a 
farmer at Felsted, Essex, at seventeen, the marriage 
taking place on 3d October 1791. Susanna's personal 
attractions were no doubt the motive. ' The most 
beautiful woman I have ever known,' says her 
husband. <A soft, angelic beauty, but she was a 
model for a sculptor.' The younger brother made 
amends for deficiency in impetuosity by excess in 
imprudence, contracting a union which soon obliged 
him to seek, though he failed to obtain, a divorce. 
Edward's wife, on the contrary, appears to have been 
a simple-minded woman, who gave her husband little 
trouble except by the wretched state of health into 
which she fell about 1812. She died in February 
1816 : 'her death,' says her husband, ' full of charity 
and love, her last breath lisping blessings on me and 
on her children.' 

The earliest notice of Edward Wakefield's vocation 
represents him as farming near Romford, in Essex, and 
afterwards at Burnham ; he was subsequently em- 
ployed under the Naval Arsenal. In 1808, when 
placing Edward Gibbon Wakefield at Westminster, he 
is described as of Ipswich ; and his letters to Francis 
Place in 18 13 and 18 14 are dated from Bury St 



6 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

Edmunds. In 1814 he established himself as a land 
agent at 42 Pall Mall. Ere this his agricultural 
employment seems to have mainly given place to land 
agency and surveying, 1 in which he acquired the 
experience which qualified him to produce the work 
on the economical condition of Ireland which has 
chiefly preserved his name. The clearest view of him, 
apart from his own private letters, is afforded by the 
MSS., preserved in the British Museum, of his coadjutor 
Francis Place, the radical, philanthropic, Malthusian, 
utilitarian tailor of Charing Cross, a man utterly 
devoid of imagination, sour, querulous, acrimonious, 
but who possessed the rare and valuable endowment 
of a genuine anxiety, founded upon a sense of justice, 
to bring the good qualities even of his adversaries to 
light. 

' My acquaintance with Mr Wakefield,' he says, 
1 must have commenced towards the close of 181 1 
or in the beginning of 18 12. We were soon well 
acquainted ; he had not then committed himself so 
absurdly as he has since done, and his sons were then 
too young to bring disgrace upon both him and 
themselves. His and their conduct put an end to 
our intimacy about the year 1822. When we first 

1 ' He is in the first employment in his line,' writes George Rose in 
18 1 5, * and steward to many persons of great property; appears ex- 
tremely intelligent, very conscious of it, and to be just saved from 
being a democrat by the power of his judgment and integrity over his 
presumption.' Southey mentions a visit from him in 1811, with an in- 
troduction from the Ettrick Shepherd. 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 7 

became friends, Mr Wakefield's circumstances were 
by no means prosperous ; he was, however, an active, 
zealous advocate for anything likely, in his opinion, 
to be useful to mankind, and especially to the 
working people of Great Britain and Ireland. He 
was publishing his book on Ireland, which contains 
abundance of information, and has been made use 
of in a multitude of ways. Mr Wakefield was at 
this time remarkably anxious to promote education 
amongst the poor, and I found in him an excellent 
co-operator for many useful purposes. 

c Mr Wakefield's parents were Quakers, and he 
was well acquainted with a large portion of the 
most respectable persons of that sect, amongst 
the rest with William Allen, whom he almost 
reverenced. He was also acquainted with Joseph 
Lancaster and Joseph Fox, and was a strong ad- 
vocate for the Joseph Lancaster method of teaching, 
and very desirous to see it extended. 1 

'Soon after we became intimately acquainted, Mr 
Wakefield introduced Mr James Mill to me.' 

Wakefield, then, knew Mill before Place himself 
did, and the acquaintance may have facilitated his 
son's proselytising exertions, when about 1830 he 
converted Stuart Mill to his theory of colonization. 
It does not appear what may have been the ab- 

1 * As for Lancaster,' says Wakefield in a letter, 'he is a most un- 
pleasant man in himself, but I am inclined to think that he will be as 
great an instrument in enlightening the human mind, and will form as 
great a change, as ever Luther did.' 



8 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

surdity on Edward Wakefield's part or the impro- 
priety on that of his sons which obliged Place, 
in his own opinion, to renounce their acquaintance 
in 1822. Possibly Place, writing in 1833, represents 
the original misunderstanding in the light of more 
recent transactions: in 1825 he had thought it 
neither absurd nor improper to solicit Edward 
Wakefield for a subscription towards the Mechanics' 
Institute he was then promoting, and had received ten 
pounds. The formality of the letter accompanying 
the donation, nevertheless, sufficiently attests the 
estrangement of the two old allies. 

Although, however, the ostensible cause of the 
estrangement of Place and Wakefield remains un- 
known, the germs of it are easily discoverable while 
their friendship was yet warm and active. Wake- 
field clearly had many failings, but of an amiable 
kind ; Place comparatively few, but those unamiable. 
Wakefield was unquestionably extravagant and lax 
in money matters, and the influence of the example 
he thus set his sons was pernicious in many ways. 
He aroused his friend's scorn by a deference to rank 
and title certainly reprehensible even in an ex-Ouaker, 
and even more so by what Place thought his cul- 
pable weakness in the concerns of his own family — 
his reluctance to place his invalid wife under guardian- 
ship, his indulgence to his sons' wildness, and what 
seemed to Place his great over-estimate of their 
abilities. These errors, for such no doubt they were, 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 9 

sprang from a sensitiveness and tenderness incompre- 
hensible to Place, a worthy man, but arid as the ' dry- 
places ' of the parable, and who eventually deals so 
faithfully with his friend as to write him down an 
ass. Even the austere James Mill judged him more 
favourably. As a practical philanthropist he had 
done excellent work. So early as September 1801, 
his mother records : c Edward dined with us ; he is 
warm in a new chase. Prisons and workhouses are 
his game. May he be inspired to enlarge the sphere 
of human happiness and virtue ! ' He says in a letter 
from Leicester, 1823 : 'There seems a fine county 
gaol. There has been a day when I should have 
gone and examined it, and conversed with the 
prisoners, but so many have taken up the cause that I 
recede.' His report on the educational and social con- 
dition of the Drury Lane district (1813) was printed 
in 1 8 16 by Brougham's Committee. c He had the 
idea,' says Place's biographer, Mr Graham Wallas, 
'of which Mr Charles Booth has made such brilliant 
use, that if permanent educational visitors were 
appointed for all London, a thorough collection of 
social statistics might be made.' He also gave much 
thought to the improvement of lunatic asylums. 

Edward Wakefield is still remembered by some as 
a beautiful old man of lofty stature, and energetic 
to a very late period of his life. He retained to the 
last his interest in public affairs and in his two prin- 
cipal pursuits, agriculture and education, and strove 



io BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

to make his experience of both available for the 
colony created by his son. The articles on New 
Zealand affairs in the Colonial Magazine, signed W., 
are in all probability by him. He was indefatigable 
in making communications to the press respecting 
natural products which could be derived from New 
Zealand or introduced there. These were usually 
addressed from Blois, where he and his second wife 
occupied a chateau, and where he endeavoured to 
establish an industry in silk. His latter years were 
principally spent near Macclesfield and in London, 
where he died in May 1854. As an educator, he 
lived again in some of his posterity, and especially in 
Edward Gibbon, whom we shall find always educat- 
ing somebody ; equally ready to admonish a minister 
when to change a policy, or a little girl when to lay 
aside a doll. 

The work by which Edward Wakefield will be 
remembered is his Account of Ireland, Statistical 
and Political, 2 vols., 1812. It originated in the 
author's examination before a Parliamentary Com- 
mittee in 1808, which produced a proposal from the 
Right Hon. John Foster, who had been Irish Chan- 
cellor of the Exchequer before the Union, that he 
should undertake a regular survey of the country, 
with a view to the ascertainment of its condition and 
resources. Provided with introductions to the chief 
landowners and leading personages on both sides of 
politics, he devoted nearly two years to the perlustra- 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD n 

tion of Ireland, and two years more to carrying his 
book through the press, thus producing a work of great 
practical value in his own day and of great historical 
interest in this. 'This very able work,' says Arthur 
Young. ( Lively, dogmatical, disorderly,' pronounces 
Sir James Mackintosh. Not confining himself to 
his ostensible object, Wakefield added chapters on 
the political and religious condition of the country, 
distinguished by strong good sense and a genuine 
zeal for humanity and improvement. Had these 
been published separately, they would have been re- 
garded as a highly entertaining book, but even the 
economical portion of the two bulky volumes is 
continually irradiated by humour, not so much from 
the author's own powers in this direction as from 
the nature of the circumstances which he describes. 
What a picture of the condition of a population is 
here presented by a single fact ! 

c Notwithstanding the population of Castle Pollard, 
which amounts to three thousand, a butcher will not 
run the risk of killing a bullock until the neighbour- 
ing gentlemen have bespoken the whole of it, which 
they generally do in quarters.' 

Why the poor cannot keep pigeons. ' Because their 
habitations are so low that the pigeons would soon 
fall a sacrifice to the cats.' 

It has appeared worth while to dwell at some 
length upon the character and performances of the 
elder Wakefield, as these serve to explain the par- 



iz BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

ticular direction taken by the activity of his son. 
Edward Gibbon Wakefield was brought up in an 
atmosphere of aggressive philanthropy, and what 
would now be termed altruism. His grandmother 
was a philanthropist by profession, and an educator 
by instinct, and such was even more conspicuously 
the case with her niece and Wakefield's own cousin, 
Elizabeth Fry, daughter of the sister of Priscilla 
Wakefield, who had married into the Gurney family. 
Edward Wakefield himself manifested his own ideal 
by naming one of his sons after John Howard, to 
whom he was in no way related (the youth thus 
named after a man of peace naturally became a 
colonel in the East India Company's army). 1 It 
was an era when zeal for human improvement was 
fruitfully rife, the era of Wilberforce and Clarkson, 
and Bentham and James Mill, and Elizabeth Fry and 
Robert Owen, the era of Bible societies and Lancas- 
trian schools, and savings banks and mechanics' in- 
stitutes, and the diffusion of useful knowledge. All 
the serious influences which surrounded Wakefield's 
youth were of a humanitarian nature, and when at last 
the wild young man, admonished by sharp discipline 

1 Howard Wakefield, nevertheless, was a real philanthropist, and 
died upon a temperance mission. He was an intimate friend of Have- 
lock's, and a good Sanscrit scholar. More Wakcjieldiano, he eloped with 
a native princess, whose affections he had gained in the disguise of a 
Mussulman. This royal descent made up for the absence of the other- 
wise indispensable sixteen quarterings when his daughter married Count 
Radolinski. The wedding took place at Kensington, attended by a 
motley assemblage of Poles, Quakers and ordinary mortals. 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 13 

and craving to rehabilitate himself with society, 
turned his thoughts to practical usefulness, the 
spirit though not the form of his labours was al- 
ready determined for him. The concentration 
of his powers on colonial questions was accidental, 
but that his project should rather be one for the 
relief of depression at home than a scheme of con- 
quest was entirely in harmony with the influences 
which had really moulded his mind, indocile to them 
as he had appeared at first. 

Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the eldest son and 
second child of a family of nine, was born in London 
on 20th March 1 796. Of his early life little is known, 
but, as his grandmother speaks of sending him to 
school on her own responsibility, his education pro- 
bably owed more to her than to either his father or 
mother. Some surviving fragments from her diary 
illustrate her anxious tenderness. 

4 May 1802. Walked to see my sweet Edward, who 
gives me great pleasure by the sweetness of his temper 
and behaviour. 

' Feb. 4, 1807. An early summons to Haigh's on 
account of a great delinquency of dear Edward's almost 
rendered me incapable of application. 

* Feb. 5. My mind most painfully engaged in the 
perverseness of my dear little Edward — his obstinacy 
if he inclines to evil terrifies me ; turned to good, it 
would be a noble firmness. 
c Feb. 7 . My thoughts much engaged with dear little 



14 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

Edward, whom I tenderly love, but whose inflexible 
pertinacious temper makes me fear for his own 
happiness, and that of those connected with him. 

'Feb. 13. My dear little Edward still in disgrace; 
my heart yearns to forgive him ; he has some fine 
qualities, but he is a character that requires delicate 
handling.' 

Wakefield's father can scarcely have designed him 
for his own profession when, in January 1808, he 
placed him at Westminster School, where he 
remained until 18 10. The step was apparently quite 
inoperative in so far as it may have aimed at imbuing 
his mind with classical culture ; his sinewy Saxon 
owes nothing to Greek or Roman models ; although 
late in life he betrays an intelligent study of Gibbon. 
One observation, made at Westminster, evinces his 
shrewdness of perception. He says [Punishment of 
Death, p. 146) that the Newgate boys who are to be 
formally let off from sentences of capital punishment, 
'have just the same air of agreeable excitement and 
self-importance, for days before the scene takes place, 
as marks a Westminster boy when he is about to be 
distinguished by acting in public' The traditions 
yet linger of a series of fights by which, though 
always beaten, he eventually wore out the bully of 
his class ; and of a Homeric battle, result unrecorded, 
between him and Erskine, Earl of Mar, who after- 
wards fought Napoleon. Westminster, however, did 
not suit the boy, who, in September 18 10, positively 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 15 

refused to return to it. His good grandmother at 
first mourns over his perversity, but when at length 
the lad has gained his point, acknowledges her 
satisfaction at his removal to Edinburgh High School, 
' where I trust he will be instructed in religion and 
morality as well as in Greek and Latin.' There 
are traces of considerable disturbances even at this 
excellent school, which Wakefield finally left in 
January 18 12. Spoiled for business and unqualified 
for a profession, his destination in life gave his father 
much anxiety. c Edward Gibbon,' observes his 
grandmother, c is at home without sufficient employ- 
ment to occupy the talents and activity of his mind ; 
consequently his present situation is disadvantageous 
to himself, and troublesome to others.' He seems to 
have found no regular occupation until 18 14, when 
he appears in the employment of the Hon. William 
Hill, afterwards Lord Berwick, at that time envoy 
to the court of Turin, but apparently much in 
England. Perhaps his specific duty was that of 
King's messenger, for the elder Wakefield writes 
to Place in October : c Edward's letter is very short, 
and amounts to nothing except the probability of 
his going to Vienna. It was dated the 15th of 
September, by this time no doubt he has left Paris, 
and is either at Genoa or on his way to Vienna. His 
fate in life depends upon his conduct during the next 
six months. Should he settle down to business as he 
ought, he will make a man, but he is very likely to 



16 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

go off at a tangent, and then I cannot tell what may 
happen to him.' 

Whether Edward Gibbon Wakefield proceeded to 
Vienna is uncertain, but this appears to have been 
the winter he mainly spent at Turin, as stated in a 
passage of his Letter from Sydney^ to be afterwards 
quoted. On 20th July 1815, Place writes to James 
Mill : c Wakefield's son returned from Turin soon 
after you left London, much improved in appearance, 
and somewhat softened, though not much, in 
manners ; I this has been produced by the contrasts 
his journeys have presented him ; and the visible 
superiority of the English over all the nations of the 
continent has made him like them better than he 
did ; his conduct has, however, been very ambiguous, 
and his tales have contradicted one another, so that 
his father, who has more of feeling than of solid judg- 
ment in his composition, has been distressed beyond 
anything you will be able to imagine. I have not 
allowed him to trifle, but have plainly and fully told 
him of his follies, and, as I think, with some effect. 
He has left Mr Hill, but not with disgrace.' 

Genius commonly has its Sturm mid Drang period, 
during which it is a nuisance to itself and everybody 
near it : contracts imprudent marriages pregnant with 
future misery like Shelley ; or takes poison to bed 

1 The fond grandmother thought more favourably. 'July 19, 1815. 
— My dear Edward Gibbon arrived, greatly improved in body and mind. 
His aspect and manner pleased me, but what most delighted me was his 
noble, independent spirit.' 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 17 

with it like Goethe ; or sends academic youth out to 
rob on the highways like Schiller ; or confides its 
money to hopeless speculations like Tennyson. In 
the light of Wakefield's subsequent history it is easy 
to discern that he was then traversing such a period, 
but it must be admitted that he had not up to this 
time given any indubitable token of genius. The 
worthy Place, so little a discerner of spirits that he 
thought the word itself might be advantageously 
omitted from the writings of Bishop Berkeley, was 
so far from any notion of the kind that he shortly 
afterwards writes to Mill : c I can tell you very little 
respecting Edward Wakefield ; his conduct is wholly 
inexplicable. He despises his father's advice, and 
laughs at his opinions ; he talks largely of being on 
his own hands, and independent of his father. I 
hope, and expect too, that he will obtain some em- 
ployment at the Foreign Office. He is best adapted 
for that line, and it is well adapted to him. I wish 
his father could make up his mind to see only a 
common man in him.' Appearances spoke in Place's 
favour, but the elder Wakefield's parental instinct 
was sounder than his friend's judgment. 

Place's opinion that the Foreign Office under 
Castlereagh offered a career highly suitable to young 
Wakefield was by no means designed as a compliment 
to the latter, who, probably by the interest of Mr Hill, 
his connection with whom was resumed, actually 
obtained some minor appointment which took him 

B 



1 8 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

to Paris. From thence, 29th August, he wrote a 
spirited letter describing the popular resentment and 
indignation produced by the execution of General 
Labedoyere. There is nothing to show that it was 
addressed to Place, though it is now among his papers 
in the British Museum, but it fell in some manner 
into his hands, and through him became the first 
composition of Wakefield's to attain the distinction 
of print, appearing in the States/nan newspaper. Not 
only was the letter printed without Place's authority, 
but the authorship was divulged in conversation, and 
on 9th September, Place writes a dismayed remon- 
strance. C I would have paid ^100 rather than that 
that letter should have been printed. Should it ever 
be known at the Foreign Office, all his prospects in 
the line of life he has chosen, and the only one he is 
fit for, would be blasted in an instant, and all the 
shame and reproach would fall upon me.' Nothing 
can have come of the indiscretion, for on 9th December 
Place writes to Mill : ' Edward is with Mr Hill in 
London. Wakefield is in raptures with him, ridicu- 
lously so. Edward is, however, provided for, and that 
too in the line in which he is most likely to continue ; 
and Wakefield, who expected him home without a 
shilling and without employment, has much to rejoice 
at. It is a rascally employment, but the world does 
not treat it as disreputable, and Edward cannot be 
spoiled by it. Edward's manners are far more agree- 
able than they were ; his knowledge of diplomacy has 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 19 

shown him the necessity of this.' The 'rascally 
employment,' then, was not devoid of redeeming 
features, and Edward's employer must have found him 
serviceable, for Place continues : ' Mr Hill will not 
allow him to be away from him for an hour even, and 
endeavours to detach him from his family, telling him 
his father has eight other children, and can spare him ; 
he laughs at him for writing to any of them, and hints 
that he will be good for little until he divests himself 
of all affection and feeling for any of them. Mr Hill 
is right ; to become an accomplished man in his em- 
ployment, one must stifle humanity and destroy all 
the kinder emotions of the heart.' Curious that the 
art of negotiating with men, in which Place himself 
was no mean proficient, should be innocent and 
respectable as long as it stays at home, but becomes 
fit only for such good-for-nothing young men as 
Place thought Wakefield so soon as it goes abroad 
and calls itself diplomacy ! In truth Mr Hill's ex- 
hortations were wasted upon Wakefield, who, after 
the first extravagances of youth had subsided, made 
an excellent son, and was beyond most men notus in 
fratres animi paterni. 

Several months now elapse without any mention 
of Wakefield in Place's correspondence until on 9th 
August 1816 comes the startling announcement, c He 
is to be married to-morrow ! ' From other sources 
of information it appears that the bride's name was 
Eliza Susan Pattle, that she was the orphan daughter 



20 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

of a merchant in the East Indies, living under her 
mother's care, and that it was a runaway match. 
Tradition, now getting dim, alleges that Wakefield, 
deeply enamoured of the beautiful girl, and naturally 
regarded by her family as a l detrimental,' followed 
her down to Tun bridge Wells, where she stayed with 
her mother and two elderly uncles addicted to cock- 
fighting. Love is depicted on ancient gems enjoying 
a combat between quails ; and so mighty was his 
power on this occasion that Wakefield, who in a 
private letter calls cruelty to animals ' disgusting,' 
became to all appearance devoted to the sport, 
and the uncles began to deem him quite an ex- 
emplary young man. He profited by his opportuni- 
ties, and one July day two carriages simultaneously 
left Tunbridge Wells, driving in opposite directions, 
one containing Edward Gibbon Wakefield and Eliza 
Pattle, the other, two persons dressed to represent 
them. The uncles followed the wrong one. Shortly 
afterwards cousin Head at Ipswich was awakened by 
Edward Gibbon entering his room at dead of night 
with the observation, 'I want your boat.' They 
descended into the garden. Eliza came forth from 
under the bushes, and the pair entered the boat, and 
rowed up the Orwell to a place of safety, news of 
their movements interrupting the good grandmother 
in the perusal of Bishop Watson's Sermons. 

The young lady being a ward in Chancery, the Lord 
Chancellor was invoked against Wakefield, but his ad- 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 21 

dress prevailed not only to persuade the Chancellor of 
the propriety of the marriage, but even to conciliate the 
mother, with whom he kept house for a time, and who 
remained his friend until her daughter's premature 
death and her own marriage to a second husband. 
4 Edward,' writes Place to Mill on 30th August, c his 
wife, and her mother will soon depart the land. I 
have not given and will not give your " congratulations 
to the young Benedict ; " he does not deserve them.' 
Here again Place was to be confuted by events. 
Wakefield's private letters, as well as family recollec- 
tions, attest that he was affectionately devoted to his 
wife, and that the too brief union was a very happy 
one. 'Mr Hill,' the elder Wakefield writes in 1823, 
' has been delighting me by talking in the highest 
terms of Edward's wife. She lived with him for four 
years as a daughter, and he thinks of her just as I do, 
describes her excellent acute sense, and yet the kind, 
reserved way ; she never forced it on you, but left it 
to you to find it out ; he talks of her gentleness, relates 
the impression which she made upon all his friends, 
and how they speak of her now ; he says that he 
could relate the most amiable stories that he heard of 
her at Genoa since she left.' J 

It is well for Wakefield's credit that unequivocal 
testimonies of his tender devotion to his young wife 

1 * Lord Byron,' Wakefield adds, ' has lived a great deal with Mr Hill 
lately. He says he is a most delightful, pleasant person, but most vindic- 
tive when he takes dislikes.' 



22 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

exist. Miss Pattle was not only a beauty but a 
fortune, and a penniless young man who carries off 
an opulent damsel in defiance of her family cannot 
complain if he is supposed to have hunted the ducats 
rather than the daughter. In the light of subsequent 
events, it is no breach of charity to attribute a share 
in determining his conduct to interested reasons, 
while, at the same time, the genuineness of his attach- 
ment is unquestionable. He probably thought with 
Tennyson's Northern Farmer : — 

'Thou can love thy lass and her money too : 
Making them go together as they've good right to do.' 

The immediate result ot the marriage was an 
improvement in his official, no less than in his 
pecuniary, position. He returned to Turin as 
Secretary to the Under Secretary of the Legation, 
the Hon. Algernon Percy, who became an intimate 
friend. It would seem from Mr Hill's statement 
that he chiefly lived at Genoa, where his daughter 
Susan Priscilla, known by her mother's pet name 
of Nina, was born on 4th December 181 7. On 
25th June 1820, his son, Edward Jerningham, was 
born in London, an event followed on 5th July by 
the death of the mother. This tragic event not 
merely occasioned him the deepest agony, but raised 
up a barrier he could never quite displace between 
him and his infant son, and prepared his estrangement 
from his wife's family. It seemed an unmitigated 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD z% 

disaster ; without it, nevertheless, the world might 
never have heard of him. He appears to have been 
for some years following connected with the Paris 
Embassy as 'secretary general and attache ad libitum.' 
At Paris, in 1822, the elder Wakefield, who continued 
to carry on his business in Pall Mall, and whose 
private address was in Charles Street, St James's Square, 
contracted, at the British Embassy, an eventful 
marriage, long kept secret, with Frances, daughter 
of the Rev. David Davies, headmaster of Macclesfield 
Grammar School ; and at Paris also, in September 
1823, Edward Gibbon acted as second in a duel. 
We must think of him at this time as a young man 
of fashion, a buck in his attire, of wild and almost 
insolent spirits, ready for any frolic, and not discrim- 
inating too nicely between frolic and mischief. 

That Wakefield, nevertheless, was not entirely 
devoted to fashionable society, appears not only 
from his father's statement, c Parliament and office 
are his first objects ; he will go in to support Mr 
Canning with the full expectation of holding a 
considerable official situation : ' but from two highly 
interesting documents not until now connected with 
his name. His authorship is proved by copies in his 
handwriting, with marginal directions showing that 
they were to be printed in some journal which 
apparently had not existed very long, and doubtless 
contained other examples of his composition. The 
longer and more elaborate of the two may be described 



24 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

as a general review of the state of public feeling, 
in the form of a letter to the Marquis of Titchfield, 
heir-apparent to the Dukedom of Portland. This 
young nobleman died in March 1824. The letter, 
therefore, is prior to that date, and internal evidence 
shows it to have been written after Canning had 
become Foreign Secretary in August 1822. It is 
remarkable not so much for any extraordinary force 
of diction, as from the affinity and the contrast it 
simultaneously presents to the ideal of another youth- 
ful genius then equally eager to open the oyster or 
the world. Although the stuff of Disraeli's Vivian 
Grey is neither more nor less than the negotiation 
for the establishment of the Representative newspaper, 
transferred with sublime audacity to the world of states- 
manship, the novel undoubtedly expresses Disraeli's 
intimate conviction ; and this is precisely the same as 
that of Wakefield's essay — the great opportunity for 
a new departure in politics afforded by the exhaustion 
of both the old parties. Each proposes to effect this 
object under the aegis of a man of rank, the Marquis 
of Titchfield, Wakefield's selection, being probably 
recommended by the character he had acquired as a 
steady and at the same time independent member since 
his entrance into the House of Commons in 18 18, and 
still more by his relationship to Canning. Both 
Disraeli and Wakefield lived to make their dreams 
realities, Durham being to the one what Bentinck 
and Derby were to the other. But the future 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 25 

Colonial statesman approves himself as superior to the 
future Prime Minister in penetration as he is inferior 
in brilliancy and humour. In Vivian Grey there is 
not a word about the people. The only forces 
recognised as operative are a few noble families and 
conspicuous politicians whose ability to dispose of the 
country at their pleasure is taken for granted. With 
Wakefield, on the contrary, the third estate is every- 
thing. The one test of the possibility of the new 
political party is, Can such a party obtain the confidence 
of the nation ? and, even though the Reform Bill 
was not yet, the passage of political power from the 
few to the many is assumed throughout as self- 
evident. The second and much briefer essay, Political 
Creed y is chiefly remarkable for an outbreak of the 
ardent patriotism and sanguine optimism which made 
Wakefield a vital force in politics, a man whose 
bent was ever to create, not merely to preserve or 
to destroy. 

' But we are enthusiasts. To be sure we are ! We 
commenced writing on politics because we are political 
enthusiasts ; because we are sick of the dull, calculat- 
ing, measured trash of one set of newspapers and the 
prejudiced, senseless, savage violence of others ; 
because we would give to such hearts as our own 
the pleasure of reading, whilst we have the pleasure 
of writing, warm and enthusiastic praise of all that 
tends to the good of our country, and censure, bold, 
unqualified and uncompromising, of every word and 



26 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

deed that appears inimical to the honour, the interests 
and the glory of dear old England. Enthusiasts 
indeed ! And is it not high time that enthusiasts 
should appear in the only cause that is worthy of 
enthusiasm ? We spurn the mawkish affectation 
which supposes that England has seen her brightest 
day of civilisation, prosperity and glory. We defy 
history to show us a country like England where all 
classes of people have been advancing together in 
knowledge, prosperity, virtue and happiness. If it 
be true that our nobles are luxurious, is it not also 
true that our peasants and mechanics have learned to 
read ? If it be true that we take more pains than 
formerly about what is ornamental, is it not also true 
that every day produces some new useful invention ? 
Have not our merchants, manufacturers, farmers and 
tradesmen made as great a progress in knowledge and 
virtue as any other class of people in the arts of luxury ? 
Is there not more sterling sense and virtue amongst 
the people at large than at any period of our history ? 
The attainment of knowledge, virtue and happiness 
are so many arts, and they have been practised in 
England, for the first time in the history of the world, 
by all classes of the people with equal success. History 
can furnish us with no materials for the discovery of 
what may happen to the English people. They 
may (and, if those who conduct their public affairs 
do but assist them, they will) reach that point of 
perfection which shall enable a good patriot to 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 27 

say without extravagance, "See England and die." 
Perish then the miserable despondency of those who 
contend that the decline and fall of England have 
commenced, and that her bright day of prosperity, 
virtue, happiness and glory has passed away for 
ever ! ' 

This passage reveals half the secret of Wakefield's 
strength. Though his faculty of interesting himself 
in public questions came from his grandmother, he had 
inherited from the paternal side an adventurous spirit 
which did not belong to the house of Bell, He was 
eager, impetuous, enthusiastic. When he had an 
object before him he made as light of obstacles as 
though to overlook them had been to overleap them. 
This is the temperament for a successful projector. 
But obstacles cannot be ' wished away ' like the 
wassailers in the Eve of St Agnes^ and his under- 
takings, both public and private, suffered from his 
refusal to recognise difficulties patent to any ordinary 
man. Yet, as his view of the greatness of his country, 
and the general progress of the age, extravagantly 
roseate as it was, was still very much nearer the truth 
than the contrary notion, so his schemes were in 
general essentially reasonable. Their defects could 
frequently be remedied or mitigated by the fertility 
of resource so commonly an attribute of the genial 
prolific temperament. When united with self- 
reliance, ambition and shrewdness, such qualities 
should carry a man far ; in Wakefield's case this 



z8 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

constellation of remarkable endowments nearly be- 
witched him to his ruin. The success of his first 
hymeneal adventure was a snare to him ; he should 
have rested his reputation upon that. 



CHAPTER II 

THE TURNER ABDUCTION WAKEFIELD^ TRIAL 

HIS IMPRISONMENT AND ITS RESULTS LETTERS 

FROM GAOL 

On 7th March 1826, a carriage appeared at the door 
of Miss Daulby, a schoolmistress near Liverpool, and 
a servant presented a letter to that lady purporting to 
come from a Dr Ainsworth, stating that the mother of 
one of her pupils, Miss Ellen Turner, daughter of Mr 
William Turner of Shrigley, a wealthy manufacturer 
in the county of Cheshire, and at the time sheriff for 
the county, had been suddenly attacked with paralysis, 
and desired her daughter to come to her immediately. 
Miss Turner was not to be told of the cause of the 
summons, a crafty precaution which prevented the 
discovery that no Dr Ainsworth existed. The school- 
mistress, completely deceived, allowed the young lady 
to depart. She was met on the road by Edward 
Gibbon Wakefield and his brother William, who on 
various pretexts allured her to Carlisle, where she was 
informed that her father's affairs were in a desperate 
condition, and that the only way to retrieve them 
was to consent to marry Edward Gibbon Wakefield. 

29 



3 o BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

Gretna Green was handy, the proposed bridegroom 
was 'gay and fashionable,' and the form of a matri- 
monial ceremony was gone through, but the marriage 
was never consummated, Wakefield promising that the 
union should be nominal until he had taught her to 
love him, as with time he assuredly would. They 
then proceeded to London and thence to Calais, 
Ellen Turner, it must be said, evincing throughout a 
docility and complacency only explicable on the 
supposition that she considered herself to have got a 
very good husband. Wakefield was equally satisfied. 
( My dear little wife,' he wrote while they were still 
together, i is an excellent creature, and promises to be 
the delight of my life.' ' I would have made her love 
me,' he said afterwards. The residence of the parties 
becoming known, they were followed to Calais by 
Mr Turner's son and friends. Ellen, confronted with 
them, elected to renounce her abductor, who on his 
part offered no opposition to her departure, subscribed 
c a solemn declaration that she and I have been as 
brother and sister,' and passed the severest condemna- 
tion on his own conduct by acknowledging that if 
any man had thus behaved to his own daughter, he 
would have shot him. 1 His friends advised him to 
take refuge in America, but he returned to England 
to share the fate of his brother William, who was 
already in custody. Frances Wakefield, the young 

1 'They took off her ring,' he says, 'and gave it to me. I shall 
preserve it carefully. They should have thrown it away.' 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 31 

men's youthful stepmother, whose clandestine marriage 
with the elder Wakefield was now acknowledged, 
Edward Wakefield saying, c I must stand by my wife,' 
was made a party to the indictment. She was in fact 
innocent of criminal complicity, yet her social am- 
bition had lain at the root of the whole adventure. 

After tedious preliminary proceedings, beginning 
with Wakefield's committal to Lancaster Castle in 
May, and frequently interrupted and resumed, the case 
was tried at Lancaster Assizes on 23d March 1827. 
Serjeant Cross and Brougham were counsel for the 
prosecution, the conduct of the case chiefly falling 
upon the latter. The Wakefields had secured Scarlett, 
the ablest advocate of the day, but there could be no 
defence upon the merits of the case. The legal ques- 
tions involved were a different matter, and the problem 
whether, under the law of Scotland, Miss Turner was 
or was not Mrs Wakefield, was so obscure that it was 
found necessary to set it at rest by a special Act of 
Parliament annulling the marriage. The evidence 
abundantly established that no force or intimidation 
had been resorted to ; it was equally clear that fraud 
had been employed, and there could be no doubt of 
the verdict as concerned the principal defendants. 
The judge summed up favourably for Frances Wake- 
field, and the jury deliberated over her case for an 
hour, but eventually found her guilty. She was not, 
however, called up for judgment, and ought to have 
been acquitted, for, suspicious as her conduct had been, 



32 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

Wakefield's subsequent declaration established her in- 
nocence. Many yet remember her in her old age as 
a lady of charming manners, and remarkable for her 
beneficence. Wakefield appeared to receive sentence 
on 14th May. In his plea for mitigation, he stated that 
the legal proceedings had cost him ^6000, and that 
half this amount had been raised by the sale of a rever- 
sionary interest of ^1500 a year. Further he could 
not go without sacrificing the interests of his children 
under their mother's settlement. This he was resolved 
never to do ; a fine, therefore, would be equivalent to 
a sentence of perpetual imprisonment, and he prayed 
that this might not be imposed upon him. The court 
took him at his word, and awarded three years' con- 
finement in Newgate, a sentence unanimously ratified 
by public opinion. William Wakefield, although the 
lesser offender, received a similar term in Lancaster 
Castle, probably because the costs of the trial had 
fallen entirely upon Edward. The latter was heard 
once more when pleading against the dissolution of 
his marriage before the House of Lords ; he spoke 
ably, said all he could, but what could he say ? x 

It must have occurred to everyone that — moral 
considerations apart — such a wild adventure was the 
very last that one would have expected a man of 
Wakefield's astuteness to engage himself in, and that 
the love of adventure must have entered into it in a 

1 Ellen Turner married in 1829 Mr Legh, representative of one of 
the first Cheshire families, and died in childbirth in 183 1. 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 33 

considerable degree. i Every age does not produce 
such a Quixote as Mr Wakefield,' said Blackwood's 
Magazine. It came out upon the trial that the 
scheme had been concocted amid the idle and fashion- 
able circle of Paris, where the Wakefields were en- 
joying what they were pleased to consider c the first 
society in the world.' Prominent in this set was Miss 
Bathurst, the stepdaughter of the Bishop of Norwich, 
who had set herself to work most disinterestedly to 
find rich wives both for Edward and William. 1 
Wakefield found himself entangled by a promise to 
his set that he would carry off c the weaver's daughter,' 
but he must have got entirely out of touch with 
his own country ere he could look upon such an 
exploit as practicable. In addition to the levity and 
recklessness engendered by a course of fashionable 
dissipation in one of sanguine temperament and over- 
flowing animal spirits, there was a potent motive in 
the background which for the time perverted his 
feeling of right and his generally vigorous common 
sense. This was not cupidity, but ambition. As we 
trace his subsequent career we shall frequently find 
him resorting to strong irregular steps, but not from 

1 Miss Bathurst, it should be said, had reason for her regard for 
Wakefield. Her deceased sister had been attached to his intimate friend, 
Percy. * Percy's mare,' Wakefield wrote to his father in 1824, * must 
be kept without work of any sort. It is a point which Percy has at 
heart, and he depends upon me in preference to other friends to secure 
the comfortable existence of the animal which was the favourite pet of 
Miss Bathurst.' 

C 



34 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

motives of mere self-interest. When, in the course 
of the legal proceedings, he accounted for his presence 
in Macclesfield by a desire to investigate the case of 
the distressed silk weavers with a view to advocating 
it in Parliament, the public, aware that this was not 
the only motive, naturally thought that it was no 
motive at all. They did not know what strong 
pressure, from a quarter most difficult to resist, had 
been put upon the elder Wakefield to induce him to 
stand for Parliament. He actually did become a 
candidate for Reading in 1826, without the smallest 
chance of success; and in 1823 he had promised that 
he and his son should both sit in the next Parliament. 
Frances Wakefield was no less urgent with the son 
than with the father, and, though no party to the 
abduction, sowed the seed of it by urging Wakefield 
to obtain Miss Turner's hand as a preliminary to re- 
presenting Macclesfield. Lack of means disabled the 
younger Wakefield from obtaining a seat by his own 
resources ; and there is no doubt that when, in a 
privately circulated paper which got into the John 
Bull, he spoke of offering himself for Parliament at 
the general election then actually impending at the 
time of the Turner affair, he fully meant what he 
said, and expected to be returned for Macclesfield, 
where his stepmother's father already held an im- 
portant position, by the influence of his reconciled 
father-in-law. He felt himself made for public life, 
and was resolved to enter upon it. This does not 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 35 

excuse his outrage upon family peace, or the decep- 
tion by which he accomplished it, but it does relieve 
him from the imputation of the merely sordid motive 
to which his conduct was then inevitably ascribed, 
but which is out of keeping with the tenor of his 
after lire. It was a just punishment that the very 
means to which he resorted to obtain a seat should 
seal his perpetual exclusion from Parliament, while 
at the same time indirectly opening to him a career 
more important than he can well have anticipated 
when he first thought of entering the House of 
Commons under the auspices of Canning. 

The change from the society of Paris to the 
society of Newgate, however mitigated by transition 
through intermediate regions peopled by judges and 
lawyers, can be no slight test of the virtue of forti- 
tude. Persons of Wakefield's sanguine temper and 
effervescent spirits are frequently liable to extreme 
dejection in adversity. It was not so with him. 
Hope, he says in the Letter from Sydney, if you know 
how to indulge it, is more grateful than reality. In 
Newgate, as will be seen, he found consolation not 
merely in the studies and observations which were to 
make him a power in the English world, but in the 
exercise of the domestic affections which he cherished 
with such singular intensity. The following letters, 
dating from an earlier period of his tribulation, are 
perhaps even more conclusive proofs of the buoyancy 
and intrepidity of his spirit, written while he was 



36 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

still agitated by hope and fear, and oppressed by the 
galling consciousness that the dexterity and astuteness 
on which he valued himself had proved downright 
folly. All are addressed to his stepmother, Frances 
Wakefield :— 

' Lancaster Castle, May 26. 

i I think it more than probable that I shall remain 
here till the Assizes. I have many reasons for pre- 
ferring a sojourn here to the doubtful attempt to 
procure admittance to bail. I do not say doubtful 
as to the fact of my being admitted to bail, for that 
I take for granted, but doubtful as to the wisdom 
of injuring my defence in making the application. 
I am very well lodged and treated in this castle. 
You ought to know how little I care for personal 
luxuries. Air, exercise, water, privacy and books 
are all-sufficient for any man of common sense and 
courage. I have all these, so I give you my word 
that, could I forget what others feel for me, I should 
at this time be as much at my ease as I ever was in 
my life.' 

* May 30. 

c I have got to myself a room twenty-four feet square 
and a yard fifty feet long. I have a fire, a table, two 
chairs, plenty of water, which to me is the same as 
plenty of air, plenty of books, pens and paper. I am 
locked into my cell at seven, but have candles, and 
I am obliged to attend chapel every day ; when, 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 37 

however, at my own request, I sit alone, unseen, 
in the condemned pew. [Ominous !] My confinement 
is solitary at my own request, but I and myself 
could always make company. At present we walk, 
talk and laugh together, without a moment's lassitude 
during the day.' 

'June 5. 

c I am pretty fully occupied in preparing my de- 
fence, and corresponding with lawyers with a view to 
it. Half an hour a day to read letters from named 
and nameless correspondents, one of which, by the 
way, has produced me the most important article of 
evidence that I shall have to produce. Some of my 
unknown correspondents write law to me, some con- 
solation, some love, and one an offer of marriage ! 
Without something to love I should be very unhappy, 
so I have a cat, with one woolly draggle of a kitten, 
and a root of grass which grows in a hole in a wall, 
and which I watch and nurse as if it were a cutting 
from the Tree of Life. My fellow prisoners are a 
stout Wigan engineer, confined for three years un- 
justly, a Manchester thief, and a miserable Irishman, 
one Patrick Blake, who, " Plase your honour and long 
life to your honour," expects to be hanged for a violent 
highway robbery. The magistrates come to stare 
at me, so I compel them, by standing and staring 
formally with my hat on, to be regularly introduced 
by the turnkey.' 



38 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

Newgate must have been a less tolerable house of 
detention than Lancaster Castle, but on the other hand 
a brighter sunbeam visited the shady place. No trace 
remains to show at what period of his imprisonment 
Wakefield began to study the question of criminal 
reform, but it probably must have been as soon as 
he had become in any measure accustomed to his new 
and repulsive society. Colonial subjects, it is almost 
certain, did not occupy him until a later period of his 
incarceration. For a while a nearer and deeper in- 
terest absorbed him — his children. With him, on 
a superficial view, the intellectual and animal souls 
seemed incongruously mated. By so much as the 
former was crafty and aggressive, by so much was the 
latter affectionate and self-denying. Tender solici- 
tude was no new thing with him. A letter of 1822 
has escaped the wreck of his correspondence, encyclo- 
paedic in its directions for the weal of his little Nina, 
in whom he beheld the image of her mother, and 
to whom he felt himself father and mother too. 
c Let her have a sufficiency of strong and thin shoes, 
and let some of the latter be of silk or jane, with 
sandal-like strings to tie crosswise round her ankles 
— teach the nurse how to tie them and how to put on 
and adjust all her clothes neatly and prettily. This 
may be done in half a dozen dressings and undressings, 
and they will be a good trial of my soul's patience, 
a virtue which she must practise against her 
will very often before it becomes habitual.' Then 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 39 

follow directions about pomatum, calomel, knitting 
needles and similar matters, expressed with as minute 
care as if he were freighting a ship to found a colony. 
It may be imagined how one who could write thus 
while leading a life of amusement would feel when 
his child seemed all that was left to him. 

''Feb. 27, 1828. 

*My dear Grandmother, — I received yesterday 
your kind letter with the inclosures for my children ; 
and to-day arrived the books from Darton's. My boy, 
upon reading your letter, became very red, sprang to- 
wards me and exclaimed, "Why, great -grandmamma 
wants me to be a sloth^ and I want to be a general or 
a prime minister or something of that kind ! " So, 
you see, he is of an aspiring nature, considering that 
he is only seven years old. Nina, on the contrary, 
quite approved your peaceable sentiments, but then 
she is a little old woman in good sense ; and, to speak 
quite seriously, she has the tenderest heart in the 
world. They will write to you immediately. 

c My confinement is in some respects very advan 
tageous to them, as I have nothing to do but to attend 
to their education, which is proceeding to my heart's 
content. Their progress during the last six months 
surprises even me, who am bound to think my own 
children prodigies. 

'Your list of Catherine's children is enough to 
brighten one ; but I know you think a numerous 



4 o BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

family a great advantage ; that is, I believe, the only 
opinion of yours in which I cannot agree with you. 
What should I do, for instance, with six ? Why, 
they must eat each other, for I could not keep them. 
But, to show you that I do not altogether disagree 
with you, I will add that I should like to have 
forty daughters with as many thousands a year to 
divide amongst them at my death, or their marriages. 
I know you would quote the bundle of sticks, but if 
all the sticks are rotten, that is, poor, what becomes 
of the argument ? 

' Both my children are learning to draw, and are as 
fond of it as I used to be when I scrawled upon every- 
thing in your Tottenham house. What a number 
of recollections that word brings to my mind ! among 
which your incessant care and kindness hold the 
highest place. ■ Mrs Fry came to see me the other day, 
and made me think of you and the old house, and that 
pond which you used to dread so much. You do not 
remember, I daresay, so I will tell you that she and her 
husband being on a visit to you, he gave me half a 
crown and told me to throw it into that same pond. 
I, being six years old, thought him a very honest 
man, and concluded that the money was bad, and that 
he wished it to be thrown away. Away I threw it, 
therefore, and came back from the pond, quite proud 
of my share in so honest an action. What I had done 
coming out, Mr Fry gave me another half-crown, 
which I kept. And at night, as if there could be no 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 41 

good without evil in this world, I went to sleep 
chuckling over the idea that I had got five shillings 
out of my father's enemies, as from something I heard 
during the day I imagined our cousins Fry to be. 
What do you think of that for a recollection ? 

c I hope you heard of Torlesse's visit to me for the 
sole purpose of advising me to send my daughter 
abroad, upon which subject he didn't open his mouth. 
His silence did him honour ; and I hope he was not 
blamed for the fruitlessness of his journey. If he were, 
it was unfairly, for had he talked till now he must still 
have gone back to report no progress. If anyone were 
to ask me for my teeth or half my limbs, I might 
perhaps part with them, but my daughter ! What 
could have put it into their heads ? 

c I have never told you of what I am sure you will 
be glad to hear, that I have learned to regard my 
uncle I with affection, to say nothing of gratitude. 
His disinterested, generous, and most friendly, I may 
say more than paternal, conduct in all my late troubles 
is far above my praise. I shall be grateful to him as 
long as I live, and afterwards, if we remember this 

1 The Daniel Wakefield already mentioned, who, after a course of 
pamphleteering and private secretaryships, became an eminent Chancery 
barrister and Q.C He shared the sanguine, enterprising temper of his 
brother and nephew. He must have possessed one professional quality — 
assurance — if there be truth in an anecdote told by his nephew that, being 
pressed by Pitt to write a pamphlet : * No,' he said, * I can't write myself, 
but if you will sit down and write, I will dictate to you !' He died in 
1846, in embarrassed circumstances,' says the Morning Post, ' owing to his 
benevolence, having often been known to refuse fees from needy clients.' 



42 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

world in the next. I never, I am sorry to say, gave 
him any cause to wish me well. Yet when I was 
in need he chose to become my friend ; he risked 
much for himself, and nothing could check his 
generous ardour, not even the earnest persuasion of 
some who, whilst I flourished, thought they could 
never do enough for me. I rejoice to add that he has 
not suffered by his kindness to me. On the contrary, 
having lost nothing, he has gained the good opinion 
of many who before regarded him with indifference. 
This is a fact, whatever you may have heard to the 
contrary. I need not apologise for thus singing his 
praises to so partial an audience as yourself. 

6 You will please my children very much by writing 
to them. They are taught to be proud of a letter 
from you, and to look forward with pleasure to going 
to see you when I can take them. Of course you 
will see Arthur. He will give you a pleasing account 
of Sierra Leone. 

c I am ashamed quite to fill this monstrous sheet, 
and therefore wish you good night. — Ever yours 
affectionately, E. G. W.' 

An enormously long letter to his sister, Catherine 
Torlesse, commenced on ist September 1828, begins 
with the most particular details of the health and 
disposition of his son, and continues : — 

* Tuesday Night. 

c I have been in a fever all day with the anxiety of 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 43 

expecting and the joy of receiving dear Nina. She 
reached me at five, and has been with me till just now 
(nine). Edward and she met in tears, and were both 
speechless for some time. He, to my surprise, was 
pale and almost faint with emotion. I took no notice 
of them, and after a time Edward left us. She then 
talked at a great rate ; but I observed that her spirits 
were artificial. At length, about seven o'clock, in the 
midst of an indifferent conversation, she burst into 
tears and threw herself into my arms, saying, or 
rather sobbing, " I didn't half take leave of aunt, we 
parted in such a hurry ! " I consoled her as well as I 
could. She said that she very nearly cried at getting 
into the coach, but that, fearing the strangers, she 
conquered herself till she got to Nay land, where she 
put her face into the corner of the coach and cried 
heartily. She said that she liked Stoke much better 
than she expected, and that she loved aunt more than 
she expected, and that she could not believe in the 
pain she suffered in coming away. After that, every 
mention of you or your children set her off again, 
and I was obliged to cut the subject. But nothing 
would make her cheerful again, though she became 
calm enough to thank me for having; her here alone 
this evening, in order to have her cry out in comfort. 
Were I an ass I should say you have stolen her heart ; 
but I rejoice at the feelings of affection for you which 
have been renewed and strengthened by this visit ; 
and I well know that she does not love me a bit the 



44 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

less for loving you so much. In fact, I know her 
tears and sobs were caused by a double excitement, 
that of losing you and finding me. What a 
beautiful, yet what a dangerous character ! I have 
sent her home with directions that she may go to 
bed immediately, and now I am Tom Fool enough 
to cry myself.' 

Such excessive sensitiveness might well excite 
Wakefield's fear for his child, and justify the minute 
directions he gives his sister to communicate to the 
lady then in charge of Nina — themselves only a 
portion of an infinity of similar directions most 
touching in their thoughtful tenderness, but far too 
voluminous for our pages. 

£ I would mention ' [in writing to Mrs A.], c having 
been struck by Nina's great sensitiveness, which 
amounts almost to a disease, and say that it requires the 
utmost care and judgment in those who surround her, 
but more especially in Mrs A. and her father, from either 
of whom a word or a frown is as bad as a blow to most 
other children. That Nina's disposition is so affec- 
tionate, even to excess, as to cause her a great deal of 
pain, and that though for the world you would not 
destroy so beautiful an attribute, you think that her 
father (this has been the case) excites it too much, that 
you think all questions of feeling should be avoided, and 
that reason only should be employed in the manage- 
ment of her. That you are satisfied she is injured every 
time she feels strongly, either joyfully or sorrowfully ; 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 45 

that every tear she sheds, be the occasion glad or 
melancholy, is a mischief done ; that occasions which 
excite in her tears of joy have just the same tendency 
to increase her too great sensibility as occasions which 
excite tears of sorrow. That in order to aid Mrs 
A.'s endeavours you wish to mention the subjects 
or points which most readily excite Nina's feelings. 
1. Anything like a doubt of her affection for those 
whom she likes. 2. Any reproach which conveys a 
reflection on her truth or honour. 3. The belief 
that she has hurt the feelings of those whom she likes. 

4. Seeing anyone whom she likes offended with her. 

5. And most particularly, any lasting but silent (if 
you can otherwise express "sulky" without being 
offensive, do so) displeasure in her father or Mrs A., 
or indeed anyone to whom she is much attached.' 

The letter concludes : — 

1 1 feel very, very much obliged to you for your 
great attention to Nina, more than I can well express. 
Her visit has been as a short time of sunshine coming 
in the midst of a dreary season. Your basket was 
very acceptable to some of the liquorish mouths that 
surround me, and as its contents were distributed in 
Nina's name, they have raised her in the esteem of 
some of her fellow- creatures. My cook, slut and butler, 
who is an Irishwoman, said on receiving some cake and 
fruit, " Sure she's a sweet cratur, sir, and it does my 
heart good to see her in this black place." There's an 
affecting mixture of bitter and sweet in that remark.' 



46 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

Strange that he who could feel so exquisitely for 
his own daughter should have had so little regard for 
the daughter of another ! Perhaps there are incon- 
sistencies as startling in every heart. 

Little could the public, when it chanced to think 
of Newgate, surmise what treasures of affection were 
hidden in one breast within its gloomy walls ; nor is it 
likely that any voice from one end of the kingdom to the 
other was raised in Wakefield's favour. What, indeed, 
could be said ? If any man had committed social felo 
de se y it seemed to be he. It would have appeared the 
wildest of prophecies had anyone told the crowds that 
watched him withdraw from the dock at Lancaster, 
or from before the bar of the House of Lords, that 
within eleven years the convicted offender would 
go forth as the confidential adviser of a British 
Proconsul, charged to reconcile a great disaffected 
dependency to the Empire ; that in aiding to accom- 
plish this end he would lay down principles which 
would all but extinguish colonial disaffection for the 
future ; that his ideas would create one colony, and 
his daring action preserve another ; that senators and 
statesmen would honour him as a superior, or contend 
with him as an equal ; that almost his last exertions 
would be devoted to co-operation with philanthropists 
and ecclesiastics in the establishment of a model 
colony. There were, in fact, two Wakefields, one of 
whom was suddenly obliterated by a catastrophe which 
destroyed the careless man of fashion, ready out of 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 47 

pure idleness and irrepressible spirits for any mischief, 
and left the powerful will and the unequalled gift of 
personal fascination concentrated on the intense pur- 
pose of rehabilitating the fallen man in the opinion of 
society. By itself, however, this would have taken 
Wakefield but a little way. The services to criminal 
reform which his longing to regain his place in 
society induced him to undertake might have atoned 
for his transgression, but he could not have ranked 
among the builders of Greater Britain if he had not 
been very much more than a practical philanthropist. 
To the surprise of all who had known him, he revealed 
himself as a man of ideas, not merely capable of 
conceiving them, but of surrendering himself to them 
with absolute devotion. From the moment that his 
colonial system occurred to him, he became its ardent 
votary on its own merits, and not merely as an 
instrument of social rehabilitation. How his convic- 
tions came to him the next chapter must describe, 
and the remainder will show how ideas became 
incarnate in colonies. The lesson of his career is 
the same that is to be derived from every human life 
that has risen above the common level, that so long 
as man's action is merely egoistic, he is a poor, and 
it may be a perverse creature ; but give him an 
object transcending the sphere of his personal interests, 
and inspire him with devotion to follow it out, and 
the height to which he may rise will be only limited 
by the quality of his own powers. In Wakefield's 



48 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

case these were of the highest order, and when the 
sharp lesson of adversity had once for all cured him 
of the pursuit of private ends by unlawful means, and 
decisively severed his connection with the frivolous, 
fashionable society which had so long kept him idle 
and useless, the hereditary but latent element in his 
character of a passion for public usefulness asserted 
itself, and he became an almost unparalleled instance 
of redemption from an apparently hopeless position in 
virtue of his devotion to a single illuminating idea — 
the regeneration of the British colonial system by the 
principles which came to be connected with his name. 
There was still not a little indirectness to lament, his 
powers were still frequently impaired by that ad- 
venturous and paradoxical bent of mind which alone 
could render such an escapade as the Turner affair 
possible — but in the main, after his ideas had once 
become matured in the salutary solitude of his prison, 
he is our best example of a type of heroism un- 
catalogued by Carlyle, the Hero as Colony Maker. 
No one can read his writings and correspondence in- 
telligently without admitting that personal advantage, 
and even the recovery of his social standing, weighed far 
less with him than the realisation of the idea of which 
he had become enamoured, and for which he fought 
with the chivalry of Coeur de Lion, if with the weapons 
of Capel Court. It was this felicitous linking of his 
own fortunes to a great public cause in which he 
sincerely believed that, even more than his abilities, 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 49 

lifted him from the well-nigh desperate plight in which 
this chapter leaves him to the position of influence and 
honour in which he will shortly be found. 'Hitch,' 
says Emerson, c your waggon to a star.' 

It is very extraordinary that the Turner escapade 
should have indirectly produced the regeneration of 
the British Museum, but such appears to have 
actually been the case. The Museum, at a low 
ebb of public usefulness in 1827, owes, as all know, 
its reform to Antonio Panizzi, who was introduced 
into it by the patronage of Lord Brougham in 1831. 
According to his biographer, Mr Fagan, Panizzi, who 
in 1827 re sided in Liverpool, and had himself given 
Italian lessons to Ellen Turner, deserved Brougham's 
gratitude by the assistance he rendered him at the 
Wakefield trial, where Brougham would hardly have 
displayed i the extraordinary knowledge of the prin- 
ciples and practice of the jurisprudence of different 
countries ' with which the reporter credits him, if he 
had not had an Italian Doctor of Laws at his elbow. 
The obligation was handsomely requited ; and it really 
seems that but for Miss Turner's abduction, both the 
British Museum and the British colonies would have 
wanted their providential man. 



CHAPTER III 

Wakefield's early writings — 'the punishment 

of death ' 6 letter from sydney ' the 

wakefield system c england and america ' 

wakefield on the agricultural labourer 

Edward Gibbon Wakefield's antecedents and 
hereditary connections have been treated with some 
minuteness, as, without acquaintance with them, it 
is impossible either to appreciate his character or to 
understand his surprising ascent from a prison cell to 
a position of influence in the national councils rarely 
indeed accorded to one unknown or disadvantageously 
known to the public and irrevocably excluded from 
Parliament. Like many other men, as has been 
already implied, Wakefield had two characters— one 
natural, the other superimposed. But whereas with 
most the engrafted character is the prop and ballast 
of the man, fortifying weak points and tempering 
congenital failings by the discipline of routine and 
public opinion, with Wakefield it was the reverse. 
He came, as we have seen, of Quaker stock, and all 
hereditary influences were of utilitarian, philanthropic 
and altruistic tendency. From this circle of ideas he 

5° 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 51 

had been projected into quite a different sphere, partly 
by his father's ambition and weakness for the counten- 
ance of the nobility, so deeply deplored by the Cato of 
Charing Cross, partly by the extraordinary revolution 
in his circumstances effected by the brilliant marriage 
which had introduced the youth of twenty to a fashion- 
able and frivolous society. All this was now at an 
end. The crystal sphere lay in shivers on the floor, 
and Wakefield, Faust-like, must build it up again 
elsewhere ; the phantoms of pleasure and gaiety fled, 
wailing, never to return ; blue books and statistics 
were to be his companions henceforth. We hear no 
more of the best society in Europe and the step- 
daughter of the Bishop of Norwich. The unworthy 
aims and trivial pursuits of his engrafted character 
were for Wakefield absolutely annihilated, save for 
the considerable — and, indeed, for his future mission, 
indispensable — acquisitions of the ease and charm of 
manner obtained by association with the great world, 
and of the tact in dealing with men which he had 
gained in the pursuits of diplomacy. The original 
nature — the instinct to mend the world and work for 
public ends — recurred in full force, and with so much 
the more energy the more clearly Wakefield discerned 
that only by giving it full play could he retrieve 
himself from the unenviable position into which the 
reckless pursuit of adventure, rather than deliberate 
ill-intent, had precipitated him. 

It was the maxim of a wise man, the late eminent 



52 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

solicitor, Edwin Field, * Always have one horse 
and one hobby.' Sometimes the hobby is the better 
horse. And so it was with Wakefield ; the more 
obvious mission yielded in importance and interest to 
one apparently more remote. Labouring at once 
to benefit the public and to redeem himself, it was 
natural that he should think first of the phenomena 
presented by the criminal society around him. His 
first idea was to write the history of Newgate, pre- 
paration for which so engrossed him that he had, he 
implicitly informs us, spent a year in prison before 
turning his attention to colonial subjects. i Nearly 
seven years ago,' he says, writing to the South 
Australian Commissioners in June 1835, 'I was 
induced to inquire into the cause of the disasters 
which,' etc. 1 His cousin Elizabeth Fry, it might 
well occur to him, had gained great fame and done 
much valuable work by her errands of mercy to 
prisoners, including himself, upon whom she had 
doubtless bestowed a piece of her mind. It remained 
for him, whose opportunities for observation were so 
much greater than hers, to lay bare the causes which 
peopled Newgate, and the effects of Newgate dis- 
cipline for good or evil. With less air and fire in 

1 An article in the Colonial Ga-zette for 29th July 1840, evidently 
written or inspired by Wakefield, says that ' it has been stated ' that the 
first idea of his system occurred to him while studying the land regula- 
tions promulgated for the Swan River settlement. These appeared in 
January 1829, but his study of them implies that his mind was already 
occupied with colonial subjects. 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 53 

his composition, Wakefield might have become a sort 
of minor Howard. Happily, however, his sanguine, 
active temper was not one that could long attach 
itself to the repulsive details of the ripening of the 
hangman's harvest, and ere he quitted prison the 
problem of colonial regeneration, at first taken up as 
a theme of somewhat remote speculation, had become 
the controlling influence of his life. This theme was 
treated by him in a work memorable in the catalogue 
of books composed in prison, even though their roll 
includes the Consolation of Boethius, Grotius's De 
Veritate, Ralegh's History of the World, and, above 
all, Pilgrim's Progress. 

Wakefield's other literary production of this period, 
The Punishment of Death, does not concern his activity 
as a colonial statesman, but it is too remarkable for its 
riveting power, and too essential to the appreciation 
of the author's genius, at once so imaginative and 
so realistic, to be passed over without some notice. 
Though not actually written, it virtually took shape 
in his mind during his imprisonment, which lasted 
from May 1827 to May 1830. During that period 
he witnessed the scenes and held the conversations 
which so deeply impressed him, and it was easy to 
reproduce them upon his release. The book appeared 
in 1 83 1, and a second edition was called for before the 
end of the year. It contributed largely to its imme- 
diate purpose of greatly restricting the denunciation 
of the death penalty, even when merely employed as 



54 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

a threat in terrorem ; it laid the foundation of the 
agitation against transportation, to which much of the 
writer's best energy was subsequently given ; and it 
served his own interests by displaying him in the light 
of one rising on the stepping-stone of a dead self 
to higher things, and pressing his own errors and 
chastisement into the service of the State. Melius 
sic poenituisse qua?n non errasse. In a literary point 
of view the book is most powerful ; but like all 
Wakefield's more comprehensive books, it fails of 
being a complete whole, and rather resembles a series 
of essays akin in subject and spirit, but which might 
very well have stood apart. 

The frequency of the punishment of death in 
Wakefield's time was undoubtedly a scandal ; Wake- 
field shows that it was also a danger. Though 
evidently opposed to its infliction under any circum- 
stances, he abstains from entering into the question, 
and contents himself with proving that its indis- 
criminate enactment, rather than execution — for in 
many instances it was known to be merely an empty 
threat — fostered corruption in prosecutors, weakness 
in witnesses, judges and juries, and reckless defiance 
or by no means unreasonable hopes among criminals, 
and thus injured society by striking at the root of the 
deterring influence of punishment, the conviction of 
its certainty. His remedies are by no means limited 
to the mitigation of the penal code, but include valu- 
able suggestions not yet sufficiently carried out, the 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 55 

establishment of a public prosecutor, and the organisa- 
tion of a preventive police. He is particularly earnest 
on the importance of rooting out the agencies by 
which youth was systematically decoyed into crime. 
His description of one of these recalls a study by a 
contemporary observer no less shrewd and graphic, 
George Borrow's delineation of the old apple woman 
on London Bridge. The repulsive subject is not 
unfrequently illuminated with humour, as in the 
description of the mock trials got up by criminals 
among themselves, with parodies of the peculiarities of 
learned judges and eminent counsel ; and the char- 
acter of thieves as practical philosophers, Epicuruses 
in their conviction of the omnipotence of chance, 
Babbages in their acute estimate of its probabilities. 
The manner in which a man's life might be muddled 
away is set forth in the story of a military officer 
named Montgomery, who, although the Bank of 
England, against which he had offended, was quite 
willing that the penalty should be mitigated, only 
escaped the halter by the phial. Wakefield had been 
kind to him, and the doomed man left a letter behind 
him which, being read at the inquest, appeared in the 
newspapers of the day. ' And so even you I dared 
not confide in — how dreadful have been my fears ! 
how torturing my hopes ! The bitterness of reflec- 
tion, that even my inestimable, most devoted friends, 
who would have done anything to save my life, I 
dared not trust with my hopes of death ! How little 



56 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

have I been known ! But for your note, but for the 
pressure of your hand, last Saturday evening would 
have ended the dreadful tragedy. God bless you ! 
May you find such a friend as your heart deserves ! ' 
Another letter, addressed to an unnamed young 
lady, is not less affecting, and the sentiment they 
irresistibly excite illustrates the truth of Wakefield's 
own impressive words : — 

' Everyone who comes in contact with a man 
whose death by the hangman is probable, treats him 
not as a criminal, but as an unfortunate. In the 
treatment of other prisoners, even before trial, when 
they are presumed to be innocent, I never observed 
anything like commiseration from persons in authority 
over them. At the best they are treated with neglect, 
except for their safe custody, and all convicts not capital 
are treated as criminals. The same men, once capitally 
convicted, are treated as brothers or children in dis- 
tress. Why is the capital convict— he whose crime 
is most grave and is proven — so favourably distin- 
guished ? Because the punishment of death shocks 
every mind to which it is vividly presented, and over- 
turns the most settled notions of right and wrong.' 

The most remarkable pages in The Punishment of 
Death, however, are the chapters on the religious 
observances connected with it, too long and too re- 
motely connected with the main subject of this volume 
to quote here, but one of the most powerful pieces 
of writing in the language. What a picture of the 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 57 

wretched quartette in the condemned pew — the bright, 
prepossessing youth, whose theft, unhappily for him, 
has been just over instead of just under five pounds ; 
the savage, hardened burglar, a returned convict ; the 
crazy sheepstealer, to be hung in spite of much inter- 
cession because many sheep have lately been stolen 
by others ; c the miserable old man in a tattered suit 
of black, a clergyman of the Church of England, 
convicted of forgery ' ! What traits, pure records 
from actual observation, but which the imagination of 
Dante could not have surpassed, as where the Ordinary, 
perceiving that the youth cannot find the place in his 
prayer-book, says quite simply, The Service for the 
Dead ! 'The youth's hands tremble as they hold the 
book upside-down.' And so it goes on until, the ser- 
vice over, the condemned return to their cells ; ' the 
forger carried by turnkeys ; the youth sobbing aloud 
convulsively, as a passionate child ; the burglar mutter- 
ing curses and savage expressions of defiance ; whilst 
the poor sheepstealer shakes hands with the turnkeys, 
whistles merrily, and points upward with madness in 
his look.' Such writing was more potent to effect the 
writer's object than his able arguments and unim- 
peachable statistics, and could have been produced bv 
no one whose destiny had not led him to combine 
theory with experience. The Athenceum well said, 
1 Out of evil comes good, for to Mr Wakefield's three 
years' imprisonment in Newgate we are indebted for 
this judicious, sensible and serviceable publication. Mr 



58 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

Wakefield has laboured wisely and diligently to atone 
for the wrongs he committed, and every good man 
will be content to forget that he ever erred.' 

The Punishment of Death was indeed a remarkable 
book, but neither in its literary merit nor the 
momentous and durable character of its effects could 
it be compared to the other product of Wakefield's 
imprisonment, the Letter from Sydney. Vigorous as 
the former was, it still related to matters within the 
writer's own cognisance ; the literary gift displayed was 
that of a consummate reporter. In the Letter from 
Sydney, Wakefield undertook to describe things not 
seen, and only known from reading, or from oral 
information, and to draw lessons from them which 
had escaped the attention of intelligent observers on 
the spot. Success as a depicter of the unseen 
demanded creative imagination, or at least a gift of 
vivid realisation hardly less exceptional ; conclusive 
reasoning from such premises required a most unusual 
share of shrewdness and penetration. The problem 
was the elucidation of the causes which had rendered 
Australia well nigh useless to the mother country, 
and these the inmate of Newgate undertook to point 
out from the other side of the world. The time, 
however, was in the writer's favour, however 
vexatiously he might be enthralled by too strict unity 
of place. The public mind had in a measure wakened 
up on the subject of the colonies. During the years 
of war, systematic emigration could not of course 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 59 

be thought of, but the lean kine which had followed 
in the train of Peace forced statesmen to consider 
seriously how to provide for a redundant and destitute 
population. America continued to take the mass of 
exiles, but men naturally felt indisposed to see our 
emigrants' blood and sinew entirely absorbed by a 
foreign country. Emigration to Canada increased ; 
much was really done towards colonising the Cape 
with Scotch agriculturists ; a new colony was actually 
founded in Western Australia, whose disasters after- 
wards supplied Wakefield with his most telling 
arguments. The idea of studying the principles of 
colonization as the outlet of his energies may well, as 
has been stated, have been suggested to him by the 
habit of brooding over maps or calling up pictures of 
foreign lands as a relief from the actual circumstances 
of his lot ; even more probably, perhaps, by the natural 
contemplation of the colonies as the best asylum for 
what must have then seemed broken fortunes and an 
irretrievably damaged character. The quotations in 
the Letter from Sydney^ which appeared in 1829, sh° w 
that he must have occupied himself for some time 
with the study of literature relating to the colonies. 
' I had occasion,' he says himself in The Punishment of 
Death^ c to read with care every book concerning New 
South Wales and Van Diemen's Land, as well as long 
series of newspapers published in those colonies.' 

Had Wakefield, however, written under his own 
name, he could have promised himself no such success 



60 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

as was to attend The Punishment of Death. He had 
qualified as an authority upon prisons ; on colonial 
subjects he could then produce no special credentials. 
His personality was accordingly suppressed, and the 
book was cast in an imaginative form. It appeared 
under the name of Robert Gouger, an actual ex- 
colonist and writer on colonial subjects (who, after 
a brief interlude of combat on the July barricades, 
became colonial secretary in South Australia), and 
purported to detail in the form of 'a letter from 
Sydney ' the experiences of a settler with a magnificent 
grant of land, which, owing to the dearth of labour, 
was hardly of more use to him than a castle in the 
air. So thoroughly had Wakefield thought himself 
into the situation and realised the sufferings of his 
Australian Tantalus, so natural was his composition 
and so unaffected his style, that no one doubted the 
genuineness of the letter, which could hardly have 
been more graphic had it indeed been written upon 
the spot. Always racy, often eloquent, its argument- 
ative cogency is continually irradiated by flashes of 
humour which indicate how exuberant under normal 
circumstances must have been the animal spirits which 
could thus struggle through the gloom of a prison. 
The main contention is that the admittedly unde- 
veloped state of the colony is owing to a want of 
labour, and that this arises from indiscriminate land 
grants. Enormous tracts had been given away to 
wealthy colonists, or sometimes stay-at-home land- 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 61 

lords, whose means, it was supposed, would enable 
them to clear them and bring them under cultivation. 
But capital without labour was even more impotent 
than labour without capital. You could not hew 
down a tree with a bank note, or cleave the soil with 
a sovereign. The sturdy arms which bank notes and 
sovereigns ought to have set in motion were not to 
be had, being all too few, and engaged in cultivating 
the small plots which their owners had obtained on 
terms equally easy, and which supported families 
sinking into barbarism. The little cultivated pro- 
perties and the great uncultivated properties alike 
remained stationary ; want of labour enchained the 
one, and want of capital the other. There was indeed 
a resource in the employment of convict labour ; but 
this was more suitable for the execution of public 
works under Government supervision than for the 
cultivation of the estates of private men, who had 
money to be stolen, and throats to be cut ; it was, 
moreover, a mere temporary palliative. ' If,' the 
imaginary colonist remarks with sarcastic humour, 
'for every acre that may be appropriated here, there 
should be a conviction for felony in England, our 
prosperity would rest on a solid basis ; but, however 
earnestly we may desire it, we cannot expect that the 
increase of crime will keep pace with the spread of 
colonization.' Wakefield's answer to the problem 
he had stated consisted in the promulgation of the 
famous theory known as the 'Wakefield System.' 



62 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

Before entering into any discussion of this much 
debated subject, it will be desirable to show clearly 
what the system was by the citation of its leading 
principles as embodied in the Outline of a System of 
Colonization, annexed to A Letter from Sydney, it being 
premised that some of them were slightly supple- 
mented and modified in the author's more mature 
Art of Colonization (1849). 1 

' It is suggested : — 

C I. That a payment in money of — per acre 
be required for all future grants of land, without 
exception. 

* II. That all land now granted, and to be granted, 
throughout the colony, be declared liable to a tax 
of — per cent, upon the actual rent. 

'III. That the proceeds of the tax upon rent, and 
of sales, form an Emigration Fund, to be employed in 
the conveyance of British labourers to the Colony 
free of cost. 

'IV. That those to whom the adminstration of 
the fund shall be entrusted be empowered to raise 
money on that security, as money is raised on the 
security of parish and county rates in England. 

' V. That the supply of labourers be as nearly 
as possible proportioned to the demand for labour at 
each settlement ; so that capitalists shall never suffer 

1 Stuart Mill points out in his Political Economy that some of Wake- 
field's views had been in some measure anticipated in an article in the 
Westminster Review for January 1826, by William Ellis, which it is not 
likely that Wakefield ever saw. 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 63 

from an urgent want of labourers, and that labourers 
shall never want well-paid employment. 

'VI. That in the selection of emigrants an ab- 
solute preference be given to young persons ; and 
that no excess of males be conveyed to the Colony 
free of cost. 

'VII. That colonists providing a passage for 
emigrant labourers, being young persons and equal 
numbers of both sexes, be entitled to a payment in 
money from the Emigration Fund equal to the 
actual contract price of a passage for so many labour- 
ing persons. 

'VIII. That grants be absolute in fee, without 
any condition whatsoever, and obtainable by deputy. 

' IX. That any surplus of the proceeds of the tax 
upon rent and of sales, over what is required for 
emigration, be employed in relief of other taxes, and 
for the general purposes of colonial government.' 

Such were the regulations as originally proposed. 
The following vigorous statement of the evils they 
were intended to combat, and the benefit they were 
expected to effect, is taken from Wakefield's re- 
markable letter to the South Australian Commis- 
sioners, June 1835, printed in the appendix to the 
South Australian Report of 1841 : — 

' When each member of a society employs no more 
capital than his own hands will use, the labour of 
the whole society is necessarily cut up into separate 
fractions as numerous as the families ; each family, 



64 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

necessarily, in order to live, cultivates the ground, 
and does scarcely anything else. As each family is 
occupied in the same mode of production, there 
is no motive for exchange between the different 
families ; and as, in such a society, there is no 
co-operation, so there can be no division of em- 
ployments ; capital and labour are so weak, so un- 
productive, that surplus produce, either for foreign 
exchange or for accumulation at home, cannot be 
raised. This is the primitive or barbarous state of 
things, under which famine is the necessary con- 
sequence of one bad season ; it is a state of things 
which all nations have suffered, and which, during 
the earlier stages of the world's progress, was in 
every nation succeeded by a state of slavery. As 
the goodness of God and the progressive nature of 
man are unquestionable, and as God has permitted 
every nation to undergo the state of slavery, so we 
may be sure that slavery has not been an evil un- 
mixed with good. Slavery appears to have been 
the step by which nations have emerged out of 
poverty and barbarism, and moved onwards towards 
wealth and civilisation. While in any country land 
was so abundant in proportion to people that every- 
one could and did obtain a piece for himself, free 
labour presented no way of escape from that primi- 
tive and barbarous condition under which poverty 
is the lot of all ; but along with slavery came 
combination of labour, division of employments, 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 65 

surplus produce of different sorts, the power of ex- 
changing, a great increase of capital, all the means, 
in short, to that better state of things in which 
slavery becomes an unmixed evil, and when, accord- 
ingly, it has been abolished. But what is the con- 
clusion bearing on the present question that we are 
to draw from this review of one of the steps by 
which Providence has ordered that nations should 
advance from barbarism to civilisation ? That con- 
clusion is that the only means by which labour 
may be comibned and employments divided, so as 
to prevent a state of miserable poverty, are either 
slavery or the existence of labour for hire. 

'The process by which a colony goes to utter 
ruin, or is reduced to misery, and then gradually 
recovers, has been witnessed over and over again. 
The colonists, proceeding from a civilised country, 
possessing capital, divided into classes, skilful, accus- 
tomed to law and order, bent on exertion, and full 
of high hopes ; such a body of people reach their 
destination, and then what happens ? The society 
which at the moment of its landing consists of two 
ranks, bearing towards each other the relation of 
master to servant, becomes instantly a dead level, 
without ranks, without either servants or masters. 
Everyone obtains land of his own. From that 
moment no one can employ more capital than his 
own hands will use. The greater part, therefore, 
of the capital which has been taken out necessarily 



66 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

wastes away. In a few months nothing in the 
shape of capital remains beyond such small stocks as 
one isolated person can manage. But those of the 
society who have not been used to labour cannot, 
with their own hands, manage even that small 
stock so as to increase or even preserve it ; while 
those who have been accustomed to nothing but 
labour, and to labour in combination with others, 
finding themselves each one alone in a vast wilder- 
ness, are unable to use with advantage such small 
stocks as they begin with ; and thus both classes 
(or rather the whole body, for there are now no 
classes) soon fall into a state of want. In these 
cases when the colony was preserved by some sort 
or assistance from without, a state of want has con- 
tinued until some sort of slavery was established. 
Such unfortunate results were the necessary results 
of placing civilised men in a situation where they 
could not but sink into that state of weakness and 
poverty which is but one step above the condition 
of the naked savage. An extensive and uninhabited 
country is a field where, unless something be done 
to counteract the influence of too much land, a 
small body of civilised people must inevitably fall 
back into what is called a primitive state. Hitherto, 
in young colonies, the influence of too much land 
has been counteracted no otherwise than by means of 
slavery. In this case [of South Australia] slave labour 
of every sort, whether that of slaves, bondsmen, re- 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 6 7 

demptioners or convicts, is wholly out of the ques- 
tion. What we have to consider, therefore, is the 
other means by which to preserve civilisation. The 
history of modern colonization exhibits a great 
number of expedients, not one of which, I venture 
to say, ever effected its object. Hence the project 
of an undertaking of which the object is to try 
whether, in countries where land is superabundant, 
free or hired labour may be secured by rendering 
land dear enough for that purpose. The projectors 
of the undertaking have concluded that, by putting 
a certain price upon public land, labourers may be 
induced to work for wages during a certain term. 
The South Australian Act excludes all other than 
this one means of securing hired labour ; it is based 
upon the assumption that no other expedient for 
that object is likely to succeed, or ought, after so 
many failures, to be tried again ; and that a price 
may be put upon all public land, which will have 
constantly the same effect as if land were never 
superabundant. 

c Such are the grounds on which it has been de- 
cided to employ, for an object never yet accom- 
plished, means never used before.' 

It will be seen that the essence of the plan con- 
sisted in directing labour to land, and retaining it 
there. The system may be compared to a system 
of irrigation, by which water is guided in artificial 
channels to the fertilisation of the soil, instead of 



68 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

being allowed to spread indiscriminately over it and 
ultimately run away. Theoretically, it followed the 
lines of Adam Smith, who ever insisted on the in- 
dispensable alliance of land, labour and capital ; prac- 
tical effect was to be given to this by the observation 
of two cardinal maxims. Land was to be sold in 
moderate quantities at a sufficient price, i.e., 2. price 
representative of its actual value in its unimproved 
condition, instead of being given away in enormous 
grants, as in Western Australia, where it had been dis- 
tributed at an average of 2000 acres to every man in 
the colony. In the second place, the amount received 
by the sale of land was to be expended in bringing out 
labourers to cultivate it, and the high price set upon 
it would prevent the poorer emigrants from becoming 
landowners until they should have accumulated pro- 
perty by labour, in pursuit of which end they must 
necessarily have done much to develop their employer's 
estates. As democratic ideas came to prevail in the 
colonies, Wakefield was attacked as though he had 
contemplated the creation of a servile caste, and the 
perpetuation of the social anomalies of the Old World. 
But he had no such object, or he would never have 
obtained the support of the great advocate of small 
landed properties, Stuart Mill ; nor has any such 
consequence followed the adoption of his system 
where it has been applied. Four years, he thought, 
would suffice to convert the exported labourer into 
a small landowner, and when civilisation had once 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 69 

obtained a hold upon the country, additional land 
sales would provide funds for further importations of 
emigrants, to be elevated into ownership in their 
turn. 1 Nor was there more foundation for the idea 
that sales of land to limited amounts would interfere 
with pasturage ; lands best adapted for pasturage were 
expressly excluded. ' It is the extreme cheapness, not 
of natural pasturage, but of land for cultivation, which 
occasions scarcity of labour for hire. Labourers could 
not become landowners by using natural pasturage.' It 
was no doubt the fact that the comparatively high 
price of land would encourage the settlement of 
persons of affluence, and thus not only bring a much 
needed stream of capital into the colony, but tend to 
impart aristocratic polish and culture to its society, 
which Wakefield deemed no disadvantage. The 
sufficient price he always refused to define ; it de- 
pended upon the peculiar circumstances of the colony, 
and required the nicest computation. In the early days 
of the Otago settlement, for example, it was found 
necessary to stimulate sales by reducing, sorely against 
the will of the colonists, the price of land from forty 
to ten shillings to obtain funds for needful public 
improvements. The gold discoveries made a few 
years later would have altered the situation. In any 

1 'Les Portugais des Azores y prosperent [at Hawaii] admirablement, 
et sont devenu en grande partie petits proprietaires apres avoir travaille 
aux plantations des Americains. Leroy-Beaulieu (Les nou-velles societes 
Anglo-Sax onnes, ch. i). Why should an English labourer fare worse 
than a Portuguese ? 



70 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

case, the price was to be absolutely fixed by responsible 
authorities, and not determined by the conflict of an 
auction. Practically it may be said to have averaged 
a pound an acre, the amount at which it was origin- 
ally fixed in South Australia, and which was re- 
established after a trial at twelve shillings. Wakefield 
would have preferred two pounds. 

The soundness or unsoundness of the Wakefield 
theory will be best discussed after the history of South 
Australia and New Zealand has afforded us the 
means of viewing it in actual operation ; and also 
after considering the form finally given to it in its 
author's Art of Colonization. But one quality it had 
which alone went far to render it a boon to the 
Empire, it was a scientific theory. 'The subject,' 
Wakefield forcibly remarks, c presented before 
1830 one very remarkable feature, namely, an im- 
mense amount of practice without any theory. 
There were long experience without a system ; im- 
mense results without a plan ; vast doings, but no 
principles.' Colonial questions, involving serious pro- 
blems in statesmanship and political economy, had 
hitherto been treated in the roughest fashion. For 
most people the Colonial question was the Convict 
question, or at most a contribution to the more 
urgent problem how to rid the mother country of 
idle and useless incumbrances. In Disraeli's Popani/Ia, 
a speck upon the sea, originally mistaken for a por- 
poise, proves to be a rock, and is immediately provided 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 71 

with a governor, a deputy - governor and store- 
keepers, ' more plentiful than stores,' not to mention 
clergy, lawyers, engineers, and an agent for the 
indemnity claims of the aborigines. c Upon what 
system,' asks Popanilla, 'does your Government sur- 
round a small rock in the middle of the sea with 
fortifications, and cram it full of clerks, soldiers, 
lawyers and priests ? ' ' Well, your Excellency, I 
believe we call it the colonial system !' 

Wakefield's pamphlet was the first great literary 
blow to this hap-hazard and this pampered officialism, 
and its exposition of the great opportunities which 
awaited the colonist with capital, provided only that 
this capital was placed in a position to command labour, 
gradually enlisted the sympathies of the most valuable 
section of the community, those not ill off nor yet so 
well off as to be indifferent to the prospect of better- 
ing themselves. It came, too, at a most auspicious 
moment, just on the eve of that development of the 
means of communication which was to afford such an 
impulse to emigration and commerce. Ere this had 
quite arrived, the public mind was fully awake on the 
subject of colonization, and the man who had chiefly 
aroused it was Edward Gibbon Wakefield. 'Never,' 
says Herman Merivale ( Lectures on Colonization, vol. ii., 
p. 56), ' was there a more remarkable instance of the 
success of a principle against all manner of mis- 
apprehension, against the fear of innovation, against 
corrupt interests, against the inert resistance which 



72 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

all novelty is sure to encounter.' Yet it has been 
recently asserted that ' the proposal took London by 
storm.' ' Pictures,' it is added, c of fruitful land, 
lovely scenery, mineral wealth, and all that could 
excite the cupidity of small capitalists, were deftly 
drawn in this publication, and fortunes that were to 
be made in creative land values were dangled before 
the eyes of the public in the most seductive literary 
style.' There is nothing of the sort in the Letter 
from Sydney, beyond the incontestable observation 
that in Australia c Nature fully performs her part in 
bestowing upon man the necessaries, comforts and 
luxuries of life.' 

In the consideration of the Wakefield theory, it 
must not be forgotten that colonization was at the 
time much more an affair of the home Govern- 
ment than is now the case. There were no ocean 
going steamers to bear emigrants swiftly and cheaply 
across the water, and no free communities on the 
other side to whose enactments and regulations they 
could be subjected upon their arrival. There was no 
possibility of despatching them in any considerable 
numbers except by the agency of the Government 
or of a private company, and no authority to pre- 
scribe the conditions of settlement except the former 
of these, or an association to which its authority should 
have been delegated. No such wholesome principle 
as that of the numerical equality of the sexes, a valu- 
able feature in the Wakefield plan, could have been 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 73 

realised without such control. It was therefore of 
the last importance that sound principles of coloniza- 
tion should be impressed upon a Government whose 
main object in colonizing was the relief of the mother 
country by the exportation of convicts, a system against 
which Wakefield always set his face, and which, as 
will be seen, he did more than any other man to 
destroy. At the present day emigrants can in general 
remove themselves to their new country, and the 
colonies themselves are in a position to stimulate the 
stream of emigration if necessary. In Wakefield's 
time the movement had to be guided and fostered, 
nay, to some extent artificially originated. The 
almost untrodden regions of Australasia teemed in- 
deed with unsuspected riches, which would in time 
be a sufficient impulse to emigration, but the first 
steps needed support, only to be obtained from 
Government or from the powerful co-operation which 
it required a Wakefield theory to call into being. 
Whatever the abstract merits or demerits of his 
system, it was invaluable as providing a standard 
and a rallying point for colonial reformers. 

One article of the Wakefield faith to which, 
taught by miscarriages in South Australia, he after- 
wards attached the highest importance, is not much 
insisted upon in the Letter from Sydney — the neces- 
sity of an accurate preliminary survey. c The survey ! 
the survey ! the survey ! ' he reiterates when writing 
to Godley at Canterbury, and Godley repeats to the 



74 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

colonists, i Nothing that Mr Wakefield has said upon 
this point is too strong.' 

The Letter from Sydney^ indeed, was too brief and 
occasional a production to constitute a systematic ex- 
position of Wakefield's views ; this must be sought in 
England and America^ and in The Art of Colonization, 
more recent by twenty years. The main idea, however, 
was there : c I constantly ask myself whether it be 
possible to devise any means by which to establish in a 
new country such a proportion between labour and land 
as would render labour plentiful and not extravagantly 
dear.' The whole may be described as a variation on 
this text. One digressive passage, a little idyll worthy 
of Goethe, may be cited as establishing once for all the 
rank which Wakefield might have attained in pure 
literature if his mind had not been so completely en- 
grossed by the practical side of life : — 

c You remember that Genoese girl before whom you 
trembled, and I became faint, though she only handed 
us some grapes ? Do you remember that, having 
recovered ourselves, we measured her eyelashes ? Do 
you remember how long they were, and how she 
laughed ? Do you remember that bright laugh, and 
how I patted her cheek, and told her that it was 
softer than her country's velvets ? And how she 
blushed — do you remember that ? — to the tips of 
her finders and the roots of her hair ? And then 
how — do you remember how ? — peasant as she was, 
and but just fifteen, she tossed her head and stamped 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 75 

her little foot with the air of a queen ? And then 
how, on a sudden, her large eyes were filled with 
tears ; and the grace with which she folded her arms 
across that charming bosom ; and the tone — I hear it 
now — the deep, grave, penetrating tone in which, half 
angry, half afraid, she at once threatened us with her 
" Berto," and implored our respect ? We did not care 
much for Mr Berto, certainly, but did we not swear, 
both together, that not a hair of her head should be 
hurt ? And when, flattered by our involuntary devo- 
tion, she departed with a healthy, lively step, showing 
her small, smooth ankles, and now and then turning 
her profile to us and laughing as before, did we not, 
dashing blades as we thought ourselves, snuffle and 
blow our noses and shake hands without the least 
motive, like two fools ? And afterwards, notwith- 
standing that gratuitous fit of friendship, did we not 
feel jealous of each other for three days, though neither 
of us could hope to see the little angel again ? Yes, 
you remember it all. Well, just such another girl as 
that brings fruit to my door every morning.' 

Wakefield's next book of importance, England and 
America (1833), is an undesigned proof that the advice 
of the Athenceum had been largely taken by the British 
public, and that the author knew it. It betrays the 
satisfaction of a man who feels that he has liquidated 
his accounts with society, and that past errors will not 
deprive him of the privilege of speaking his mind with 
the freedom of Figaro, and with a more extensive 



y6 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

choice of topics. Like the Letter from Sydney^ it is 
anonymous, but the writer's identity can have been no 
great mystery. It was published by Bentley, whom 
Wakefield accuses in a subsequent work of having 
taken advantage of his absence on the Continent to 
disfigure it with c a puffing title.' This title certainly 
misleads ; the book does not offer that close and 
accurate parallel between the two countries which the 
reader is naturally led to expect ; but in truth the en- 
tire work somewhat disappoints from its desultoriness ; 
it has not the unity and directness of purpose of its 
predecessors, but rather offers the miscellaneous re- 
flections of an acute and powerful mind. The first 
chapter presents a brilliant description of the wealth 
of England, explained as the result of the combination 
of labour and capital, and of the minute subdivi- 
sion of the former. The second chapter is devoted to 
an equally powerful, and unhappily equally accurate, 
description of the misery of the lower, and the harassed 
anxiety of the middle classes, followed by a retrospect 
of recent political occurrences, and an inquiry into 
the most likely means of averting the menaced 
revolution. These are, free trade in corn, the 
extension of trade with the East, and scientific 
colonization. The writer argues with great power 
for the total and immediate, rather than gradual, 
abolition of the corn laws. This view was held by 
so many of the scientific political economists of the 
day that it is very remarkable that their reasoning 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 77 

should have virtually produced no impression until 
taken up by a body of men little enamoured of 
abstract truth — the Lancashire manufacturers. The 
demonstration that the admission of foreign corn must 
produce a greatly extended demand for British manu- 
factures had been perfect, but remained merely 
academical until the pocket gave it access to the 
head. The other side of the question — the danger 
of exclusive dependence upon foreign countries for the 
necessaries of life — is no more considered by Wakefield 
than by the Manchester School. He predicts, indeed, 
that America would grow grain cheaper than any 
other country, but the fabulous cheapness of transport 
by the power of steam could not then be anticipated, 
nor the consequent injury to British agriculture 
foreseen. The remarks on the China trade may be 
read with interest now that the question of opening 
up China has become of such importance. It is 
strange that nothing should be said about India ; and 
none could then foresee that the Eastern countries, 
with their fabulous cheapness of labour, and the 
material at their doors, would manufacture on their 
own account, or on the account of foreign capitalists, 
with an energy and success which may yet convert 
Manchester to protection. 

The most important part of the book, however, is 
Wakefield's re-statement of his theory of colonization, 
which he had been unable to exhibit scientifically 
in the Letter from Sydney on account' of the lively 



78 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

and dramatic form in which that book is cast. As 
concerned the interests of the colonies, he had little 
to do but to set forth the case of the mischief caused 
by enormous land-holdings and the consequent scarcity 
and inefficiency of labour from its dispersal over too 
wide an area ; but having now a foot at home as well 
as abroad, he is able to enter more fully into the case 
of the mother country, whose requisites in this point 
of view he sums up under three heads — extension of 
markets, relief from excessive numbers, enlargement 
of the field for employing capital — all of them objects 
which the system or no-system of colonization prac- 
tised up to his time tended in but the slightest degree 
to promote. Whether his own theory was sound or 
unsound, he compelled men to think, and an era dates 
from him. This luminous chapter, being entitled 
c The Art of Colonization,' has been frequently mis- 
taken for the elaborate work on the subject published 
under the same title sixteen years afterwards, which 
is dated in many bibliographies 1833. 

The style of England and America is less finished 
than that of most of Wakefield's writings, and the 
chapters wear less the appearance of literary essays 
than of imperfect reports or ot memoranda for speeches. 
Effective as they are, they would have been more 
powerful still as oral deliverances. But this could 
never be. Ample as had been his atonement for the 
offence he had committed against society, he could not 
be safely brought forward for any open borough, and 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 79 

the nomination boroughs which might have procured 
him admission to Parliament disappeared contempor- 
aneously with his entrance upon public life. He did, 
indeed, offer himself to the electors of Birmingham in 
1836, but the appeal met with no response ; the party 
managers were little likely to entrust their cause to 
one so obviously vulnerable. Could he have entered 
the Commons, he must sooner or later have fought 
his way to the Cabinet, and it may have been the 
bitterest part of his penalty to contemplate the success 
of inferior men in the career from which he had 
irrevocably excluded himself. Yet it was best as it was. 
But for his disaster it is extremely doubtful whether 
he would have been specially attracted to the colonial 
department of affairs. As a Member of Parliament 
he would have been obliged to apply his mind to 
a variety of subjects, and his energies might have 
been frittered away among them. Circumstances 
compelled the concentration of the discursive activities 
of his mind upon a single subject, and gave him the 
mission without which he might have gone down to 
posterity as a useful M.P. and a successful administra- 
tor, but not as a builder of Greater Britain. The cause 
of the colonies was at this time better served by wire- 
pulling than by oratory. Our colonial heroes were no 
longer great voyagers and discoverers, nor even great 
administrators of distant dependencies, but the thinkers 
who worked out principles of colonization at home, and 
the organisers who impressed them upon public opinion. 



8o BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

Both these characters were united in Wakefield in a 
surprising degree. What he was as a thinker we have 
seen, but his insight into the abstract science of colon- 
ization was no greater than his gift of controlling and 
managing men. No man knew better how to play 
upon the various human passions, from the loftiest 
philanthropy down to the most sordid self-seeking, 
capable of being enlisted in the support of a colonizing 
venture. None could make himself so readily all 
things to all men, none could so dexterously guide the 
inquiries of a Parliamentary committee to the desired 
point, or attract a patron, or inspire a newspaper. But 
the greater part of these subterranean activities never 
came to light, and cannot now be retrieved. Their 
really gigantic sum can only be inferred from com- 
paratively scanty vestiges — enough, however, to show 
that the labours of colonv-making would have excluded 
all possibility of attending to other subjects, or even of 
sharing in the ordinary committee work of the House 
of Commons. 

Before becoming entirely engrossed with colonial 
subjects, Wakefield produced some pamphlets on social 
questions at home, only one of which is worthy of 
especial attention. The title, Swing Unmasked, happily 
conveys no idea to the present generation, who have 
not seen the systematic burnings of farm produce 
attributed in the slang of the perpetrators to ' Captain 
Swing/ and for which bad poor laws, bad corn laws, 
and the absence of all educational legislation were 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 81 

mainly responsible. It did not need Wakefield's 
sagacity to discover causes so near the surface, but few- 
could have equalled the vividness of his picture of the 
prowling serf hugging the tinder-box that makes him 
terrible, and the ensuing reflections are as just as they 
are striking : — 

' A Swing fire has taken place ; what a commotion 
ensues in the parish ! Is it credible that the pauper 
should not view with satisfaction the flurried steps and 
pale face of the rector, the assumed air of indifference, 
not half concealing the uneasiness of my lord who 
owns the soil on which the stacks were burnt, and the 
violent rage of a neighbouring squire, mixed with 
nervous indications ? The powerful of his neighbour- 
hood, before whom he used to tremble, now shake in 
their turn. He is anxiously noticed by well-dressed 
passers-by, who before treated him as a beast of the 
field, but now make anxious inquiries after his wants, 
and take pains to become acquainted with his peasant's 
nature. What is yet more to the purpose, a new scale 
of wages becomes the topic of his parish, and is 
probably adopted, after an understanding between the 
landlords, clergymen and tenants that rent and tithes 
shall be reduced in proportion as wages are raised. 
When his family ask for bread, they receive it, and at 
noon there is an unusual smell of bacon about the 
cottage. He has now firing enough to dry his clothes, 
which, before the stack was burnt, he used to put on 
of a morning as wet as when he had taken them off 

F 



82 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

at night. Moreover, his rustic vanity is gratified by- 
reading in the county paper a minute account of the 
deed that he has done. Lastly, when he returns 
home, thinking of what he has also read in that paper, 
as coming from the lips of a Parliament man, about 
"the urgent necessity of some permanent improve- 
ment in the condition of the poor," he becomes fonder 
than usual of his wife, and kinder to his children ; and 
when they ask him why, he is prevented from speaking 
by what he would call a lump in the throat, but he 
answers, aside, with one great rude tear of joy. He 
has burnt a stack, and his heart (it has just been 
discovered that paupers have hearts), lately so poor and 
pinched, is now swelling with the strange pleasure 
of hope.' 

Such observations, probably made at his brother-in- 
law's Suffolk parsonage, were calculated to nourish 
Wakefield's enthusiasm for colonization. He might 
well deem it a good deed to place the degraded serf 
where he might become a man ; and if he did not 
think him fit to become a landed proprietor until he 
had done something to discharge his obligation to the 
benefactors who had planted him in a new soil with 
new hopes and new opportunities, such a view appears 
in no respect inconsistent with equity, humanity or 
common sense. 

Wakefield was released in May 1830. He had 
throughout had to congratulate himself upon the loyal 
support of his family, who continued to recognise him 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 83 

as their natural chief notwithstanding the discredit 
he had brought upon them. His principal comforter 
during his captivity, however, appears to have been his 
cousin, John Head, who upon his liberation took 
him to his house at Ipswich, where his aged grand- 
mother was verging towards the close of her long and 
useful life. Her admonitions and benediction, we may- 
be sure, were not wanting to Wakefield, who after no 
long interval returned to London, to gather around 
him the more thoughtful of the readers of A Letter 
from Sydney^ and to commence his career as a founder 
by founding the Colonization-Society — the little leaven 
destined to leaven the whole lump. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE COLONIZATION SOCIETY THE SWAN RIVER 

SETTLEMENT — THE FOUNDATION OF SOUTH AUS- 

TE.ALIA THE SOUTH AUSTRALIAN COMMISSIONERS 

MR G. F. ANGAS NINA WAKEFIELD HER 

DEATH EARLY STRUGGLES OF THE COLONY 

TESTIMONY TO THE WAKEFIELD SYSTEM 

The year 1830, memorable as the date of the 
overthrow of the Tory party, which, with scarcely 
an interruption, had governed England for forty- 
six years, of the Revolution of July in France, 
and of the outbreak of the struggle between crea- 
tionist and evolutionary theories which Goethe 
thought so infinitely more important than the last- 
named event, also witnessed the inauguration of a 
reform of the colonial system of the British Empire. 1 
4 When,' asked Roebuck with a sneer before the 
Colonial Lands Committee of 1836, i when was it 
that your peculiar doctrines on colonization were first 
broached?' c In 1830,' Wakefield replied; and he 

1 It should be superfluous to remark that, whenever * Britain ' is men- 
tioned in these pages, Ireland is included as one of the British Islands, 
the Britannia of the ancients. 

84 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 85 

frequently repeats this date in his Art of Colonization , 
and describes himself and his associates as ' the theorists 
of 1830.' 'When,' he observes, 'Englishmen or 
Americans have a public object, they meet, appoint a 
chairman and secretary, pass resolutions and subscribe 
money ; in other words, they set to work for them- 
selves, instead of waiting to see what their government 
may do for them. This self-relying course was adopted 
by a few people in London in 1830, who formed an 
association which they called the Colonization Society.' 
The views promulgated in A Letter from Sydney had 
attracted attention, and the author's ability to take an 
active personal part in their propagation fortunately 
coincided with an event which demonstrated that, 
whether or no Wakefield was very right, our colonial 
administrators were very wrong. i The ideas of the 
founders of the Colonization Society of 1830,' he says, 
' grew out of the first proceedings of the British Gov- 
ernment in settling the Swan River in West Australia.' 
Prevision of the lamentable failure of this undertaking 
had, it will be remembered, inspired his first work on 
colonization. The cause and the nature of the disaster 
are described in his England and America^ but were 
even more graphically narrated viva voce to the Colonial 
Lands Committee of 1836 : — 

' That colony, which was founded with a very 
general hope in this country that it would prove 
a most prosperous colony, has all but perished. It 
has not quite perished, but the population is a great 



86 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

deal less than the number of emigrants ; it has been 
a diminishing population since its foundation. The 
greater part of the capital which was taken out 
(and that was very large) has disappeared altogether, 
and a great portion of the labourers taken out 
(and they were a very considerable number) have 
emigrated a second time to Van Diemen's Land 
and New South Wales. The many disasters which 
befell this colony appear to me to be accounted 
for at once by the manner in which land was 
granted. The first grant consisted of 500,000 acres 
to an individual — Mr Peel. That grant was marked 
out upon the map in England — 500,000 acres were 
taken round about the port or landing-place. It 
was quite impossible for Mr Peel to cultivate 
500,000 acres, or a hundredth part of the grant ; 
but others were of course necessitated to go beyond 
his grant in order to take their land, so that the 
first operation in that colony was to create a great 
desert. The Governor took another 100,000 acres ; 
another person took 80,000 acres ; and the dis- 
persion was so great that at last the settlers did 
not know where they were ; that is, each settler 
knew where he was, but he could not tell where 
anyone else was, and therefore he did not know 
his own position. That was why some people died 
of hunger, for although there was an ample supply 
of food at the Governor's house, the settlers did not 
know where the Governor was, and the Governor 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 87 

did not know where the settlers were. Then, 
besides the evils resulting from dispersion, there 
occurred what I consider almost a greater one, the 
separation of the people and the want of combinable 
labour. On finding that land could be obtained 
with the greatest facility, the labourers, taken out 
under contracts which assured them of very high 
wages if they would labour a certain time for wages, 
laughed at their masters. Mr Peel carried out 
altogether about 300 persons. In six months after 
his arrival he was obliged to make his own bed, 
and fetch water for himself and light his own fire. 
All his labourers had left him. The capital, there- 
fore, which he took out — implements, seeds and 
stock — immediately perished ; without shepherds to 
take care of the sheep, the sheep wandered and 
were lost, eaten by the native dogs and killed by 
the natives and some of the other colonists, very 
likely his own workmen ; his seeds perished on the 
beach ; his wooden houses were there in frame, in 
pieces, but could not be put together, and were 
therefore quite useless, and rotted on the beach. 
This was the case with the capitalists generally. 
The labourers, obtaining land very readily, and 
running about to fix upon locations for themselves, 
very soon separated themselves into isolated families, 
like the Irish cottiers, but having, instead of a small 
piece of land, a large extent of land. Everyone 
was separated, and very soon fell into the greatest 



88 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

distress. Falling into the greatest distress, they 
returned to their masters, and insisted upon the 
fulfilment of the agreements upon which they had 
gone out ; but Mr Peel said, " All my capital is 
gone, you have ruined me by deserting me, by 
breaking your engagements ; and now you insist 
upon my observing the engagements when you 
yourselves have deprived me of the means of doing 
so." They wanted to hang him, and he ran away 
to a distance, where he secreted himself for a time 
till they were carried off to Van Diemen's Land, 
where they obtained food.' 

' The kingdom of heaven cometh not with observa- 
tion.' Who the original members of the Colonization 
Society were we have not been able to ascertain. 
Wakefield says that the number of founders did not 
pass a dozen, and describes them as ' an unknown 
and feeble body, composed chiefly of very young 
men, some of whose names, however, have long 
ceased to be obscure, while others are amongst the 
most celebrated of our day.' Grote, Molesworth and 
Stuart Mill were probably among them ; the last- 
named, at all events, says that he became convinced 
of the substantial soundness of the Wakefield theory 
from the discussions which he heard about this time. 
Mill's interests, however, were too numerous and 
various to allow him to devote his main attention 
to colonial matters ; and more practical service was 
rendered by one who seldom wrote a line, but in 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 89 

whose journal the reformers entrenched themselves 
as in a fortress. This was Robert Stephen Rintoul, 
the clear-headed, practical, and at the same time 
tenacious and loyal Scotchman who had come from 
Dundee to edit the Atlas, and seceded from it to 
the Spectator. Whether by the fascination of his 
personal magnetism, or by cogency of reasoning, 
Wakefield established a complete ascendancy over 
Rintoul, and, until his departure for New Zealand 
in 1852, could look upon the Spectator as his organ 
in all matters relating to the colonies. Warm- 
hearted and grateful as he ever was to friends, he 
was forward to acknowledge the obligation. ' By 
far the heaviest of my debts of gratitude is due to 
the proprietor and editor of the Spectator newspaper ' 
[Art of Colonization, p. 59). And addressing Rintoul 
personally in December 1841, he describes him as 
1 the person to whom I am especially indebted for 
having been able to propose with effect recent 
improvements in the art of colonization. You 
patiently examined my proposals and manfully upheld 
them when they were treated with disdain or ridicule. 
For whatever share of credit may be due to me, I am 
chiefly indebted to you. I should have done nothing 
at all if you had not constantly helped me, during the 
years when the pursuit of systematic colonization was 
a continual struggle with difficulties.' I 

1 Rintoul annotates with no less magnanimity : * With the generosity 
of most high intellects, Mr Wakefield attributes to the aid of others 



90 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

Another very distinguished person, who afterwards 
contributed much to give practical shape to Wake- 
field's ideas, Colonel Torrens, was not altogether 
friendly at first. c But,' he told the Colonial Lands 
Committee, c I very soon, in discussing the question 
with the gentlemen of the Colonization Society, 
found that they defined their terms or modified 
their principles so as to obviate the objections raised 
by Mr Malthus and myself. As soon as I found 
the system so explained or modified as to permit 
population and capital to spread freely over the 
most fertile and best situated lands, my objection 
was removed and my opposition ceased. The more 
I consider, the more entirely I approve. I have a 
strong and growing conviction that at no distant 
period the country will have to acknowledge a large 
debt of gratitude to the author of this plan ' — that 
is, to Wakefield. Wakefield, however, was much 
more than the author of the plan ; he was also its 
chief executant. c It would be affectation to pre- 
tend,' he says, ' that in the labours of the theorists 
of 1830 I have had any but the principal share.' 
The justice of this claim has never been contested. 
There have been greater thinkers and there have 

successes commanded by his own great powers ; it was these ever that 
compelled the aid which he acknowledges. The kind of merit which the 
Spectator seeks not to disclaim, is simply that of not being frightened by 
the novelty of a scientific proposition ; and of having, when examination 
had assured us of its solidity, held by it until others have become as con- 
vinced of its utility and of its practical nature as we are.' 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 91 

been greater workers, but there have been few in 
whom the gifts of the thinker and the worker have 
been so harmoniously combined. Cobden was an 
unanswerable debater, but a cipher on a committee. 
George Wilson could neither convince by argument 
nor move by eloquence, but he was unsurpassed as 
a political organiser. Wakefield was Cobden and 
Wilson in one, only marred by the sallies of passion 
which he could never quite suppress, and the pro- 
pensity to paradox almost inseparable from a vivid 
imagination. 

The Colonization Society in its first phase appears 
to have never been influential or numerous ; it 
approached Ministers unsuccessfully and circulated 
pamphlets not now easy to trace. A controversy 
with Mr Wilmot Horton and Colonel Torrens, 
Wakefield says, put an end to it, but it revived in 1837, 
when it had three hundred members, and traces of 
its activity are found down to 1844. Long ere this 
period, Wakefield's principles had passed from the 
domain of theory into that of practice. The first 
step had been taken in 1831, when, at the instance 
of the Society, Government determined to abolish 
the system of free grants of land in New South 
Wales, and to exact the price of five shillings per 
acre, a measure which, although in Wakefield's view 
very inadequate, nevertheless conceded his principle. 
The employment of the purchase money as a fund 
for defraying the cost of transporting emigrants was 



92 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

also recognised. But the promoters could neither 
be satisfied with the hesitating application here nor 
with any application of their ideas to a community 
where transportation was still maintained. They de- 
termined to found a new colony. 

* At that time,' says Wakefield, ' the country now 
known by the name of South Australia was a name- 
less desert about which nothing was known by the 
public or the Government.' The shore line had been 
merely coasted, though French adventurers had landed 
on Kangaroo Island. The interior had been dis- 
covered and very slightly explored by Captain Sturt, 
who in 1829 had followed the River Murray down 
to its mouth, and ascertained that it was practically 
inaccessible from the sea owing to the shallowness of 
the lake into which it debouches. But Sturt had 
never stood where Adelaide now stands. In the 
handbook to the colony which Wakefield wrote and 
published anonymously in 1834, when, by the incor- 
poration of the Company, South Australia had become 
something more than a mere geographical expression, 1 
he can only say, after having adduced all procurable 
testimony in favour of its capabilities, ' Everyone 
must be left to draw conclusions for himself as to the 
fitness of the place for the purposes of colonization.' 
The boundaries of the c place,' as traced by Wakefield 

1 The Neio British Province of South Australia. Charles Knight, 1835. 
The author's name nowhere occurs in this handbook, but there are fre- 
quent quotations from his writings. 




SOUTH AUSTRALIA IN 1837. 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 93 

and Charles Buller jointly with a pencil upon a map 
of Australia, and subsequently defined by Act of 
Parliament, were 'all that part of Australia which 
lies between the 132nd and the 141st degrees of east 
longitude, and between the southern ocean and the 
tropic of Capricorn, together with the islands adjacent 
thereto ' — about a third of the extent of the colony 
as it exists to-day. It was necessary to keep clear of 
Port Phillip, now Victoria, then comprehended within 
the limits of New South Wales. The new colony, it 
was especially provided, was to be for ever exempt from 
convicts, and this sufficed to make New South Wales 
and Van Diemen's Land inimical. The courage of 
the adventurers will not be duly appreciated without 
consideration of the risk they ran of total failure in 
a region so little known, and where it was but 
common prudence to expect many unforeseen ob- 
stacles. Yet Wakefield could argue powerfully from 
analogy that South Australia must, like New South 
Wales, be capable of producing oil, wine, silk and 
tobacco ; the exports of meat and fruit which we now 
see could not be dreamed of in the absence of steam 
and ice, nor was it surmised that South Australia was 
a country ' out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass.' * 
But there was the certainty of valuable timber and 



1 The French explorers of Kangaroo Island mention a curious source 
of profit, the silk of the mussel, or pinna marina, which, Wakefield says, 
is highly valued in Italy for its convertibility into a fine and durable 
stuff. We do not know whether it has been utilised in Australia. 



94 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

the promise of coal and slate ; while it was clear that, 
if the new colony was fit for anything at all, it must 
be productive of wool. In fact, the prejudice that it 
might be eminently but solely fit for pasturage re- 
quired to be combated. The narratives of voyagers 
were ransacked for facts, but Wakefield was greater 
still in the application of his theory. His residence in 
Italy had familiarised him with the practice of irriga- 
tion, and he showed that neither the reclamation 
of morasses nor the clearing away of the heavy 
timber would be practicable with the dispersion of 
labour which the no-system of older colonies en- 
couraged, and which his system had been devised to 
cure. c If existing colonies had been prosperous and 
attractive, there might have been no sufficient motive 
for forming another settlement. The existing colonies 
are not very prosperous and attractive, only by reason 
of certain great defects of which the causes may be 
discovered by any diligent inquirer. The merits of 
the plan rest upon the errors of other plans, and 
become obvious only when contrasted with those 
errors.' * Hence Wakefield's South Australian hand- 
book has inevitably a more polemical tone than might 
have been looked for in an exposition of the advan- 
tages of a new colony. 



1 Robert Gouger, probably under Wakefield's inspiration, had initiated 
a colonizing movement in 1829, but the scheme quickly fell to the ground, 
and Gouger's efforts to revive it proved fruitless until it was taken up 
by the Colonization Society. 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 95 

When this handbook was published, the infant 
colony, though aground for want of money, had 
surmounted parliamentary and official impediments. 
The history of its difficulties with the Colonial Office 
and in the House of Commons has been often told. 
No one who has had any experience of official ways 
will wonder at the obstacles raised by the Colonial 
Office ; and it must in fairness be owned that the 
repression of crude schemes and the probation of sound 
ones really are important official functions, the efficient 
discharge of which has saved the British tax-payer 
many a good penny. To rise to the height of a great 
occasion, to put aside plausible objections and even 
overlook serious irregularities, to feel warmly towards 
an individual or an association which seeks to promote 
great national objects, and to judge him or it by a 
higher standard than that of the code or the ledger, 
require quite a different order of gifts, which, though 
not absent from the Colonial Office of our own day, 
would have been vainly sought there in 1831, 
when the South Australian projectors approached 
the authorities with what officialism deemed an un- 
seemly buoyancy. They consisted of two classes. The 
one comprised the theorists of the Colonization Society, 
including their new and illustrious convert, Colonel 
Torrens, who looked at the matter partly from a 
patriotic point of view, as a relief to a struggling 
country swamped with pauperism, partly from a scien- 
tific standpoint, as a beautiful experiment in economics. 



96 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

The other was composed of capitalists and men of busi- 
ness, partly actuated by the hope of profit, but to a very 
great extent, and especially in the case of Mr George 
Fife Angas, the most prominent among them, by 
philanthropic motives, including antipathy to convict- 
ism and State churches. The first division had already 
approached the then Colonial Secretary (probably Sir 
George Murray) on the subject of systematic emigra- 
tion. c He told us that the Government rather wished 
to discourage emigration. When requested to observe 
that the scheme was not one of emigration, but of 
colonization, which itself would deal with the emigra- 
tion, his reply showed that he had not conceived the 
distinction, nor ever paid any attention to any part of 
the subject.' But the hopes thus dashed had been 
revived by the action of Sir George Murray's successor, 
Viscount Goderich, who, at the instigation, as was 
thought, of the Under Secretary, Lord Howick, had 
given partial effect to Wakefield's ideas by stopping 
gratuitous grants of land in New South Wales, a step 
highly to the honour of these statesmen, and a remark- 
able instance of a reform accomplished without popular 
pressure. * The colonies,' says Wakefield, ' if they 
had been consulted, would have earnestly objected to 
this resolution, as they afterwards protested against 
it ; the colonial governments, and the members of the 
Colonial Office as a body, greatly disliked it, because 
it went to deprive them of patronage and power ; the 
very few persons who at the time desired this change 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 97 

were obscure and feeble, and yet all of a sudden, 
without inquiry by Parliament or the Executive 
government, without a word of notice to those most 
concerned, and without observation from anybody, 
out came an Imperial decree, by which, in the 
principal colonies of England, the plan of selling waste 
lands was completely substituted for that of free 
grants.' The second great principle of the Wakefield 
system, the employment of the proceeds of the land 
sales in bringing out emigrants, was also adopted, and 
the promoters of the South Australian project felt 
sanguine ; but soon discovered that though their ideas 
might find favour, they themselves were objects of 
jealousy and suspicion. This was in some measure 
their own fault. Colonel Torrens and Wakefield, the 
authors of the draft of the charter for which, after an 
abortive attempt to start colonization in 1831 on the 
strength of a supposed verbal sanction, promptly 
disavowed by Lord Howick, application was made 
in 1832, wanted to regulate everything, from the 
boundaries of the colony to the prospective enrolment 
of a militia. This latitude of plan gave scope for 
innumerable objections on the part of the Colonial 
Secretary, the general drift of which may be condensed 
into one, 'that it was proposed to erect within the 
British monarchy a government purely republican.' 
When the plan was modified in deference to these 
objections, the unpropitiated Secretary retorted that, 
' As the Committee were so ready to abandon essential 



98 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

portions of their scheme, he had serious misgivings 
as to the maturity of their knowledge and counsel.' 
'The error,' Mr Hodder justly observes, 'was in ask- 
ing too much and then too little, the result being that 
they got nothing.' Yet the idea which lay at the 
root of their error was sound. 'We attached,' says 
Wakefield, 'the highest importance to the subject 
of government, believing that the best economical 
arrangements could not work well without provisions 
for a good political government for the colonists.' 
Here is the germ of the famous Durham Report, and 
of the struggle for responsible government which 
occupied Wakefield's last active years. ' As,' he con- 
tinues, ' we could not move an inch without the 
sanction of the Office, we now resolved to abandon 
the political part of our scheme, in the hope of 
being able to realise the economical part.' So baseless 
is the assertion of late gravely made, that ' naturally 
enough^ the scheme was hailed with rapture by 
Government ' ! 

In 1833, England and America was published, with 
an appendix containing some of the correspondence 
which had passed between the projectors and the 
Government. 'The publication,' says Wakefield, 
' enabled us to get together another body of colonists, 
most of those who had previously wished to emigrate 
to Australia having gone to America.' The siege of 
the Colonial Office was resumed, but with little effect 
until 1834, when a powerful company was formed 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 99 

under the title of the South Australian Association, 
with Mr Whitmore, M.P., for chairman, and includ- 
ing among the directorate such names as Buller, 
Grote, Molesworth, Torrens, Warburton and H. G. 
Ward. Wakefield pulled every string, but his con- 
nection with the company was not ostensible. His 
name was never mentioned — and at the period it 
would have been inexpedient to have mentioned it 
— at the large and influential meeting held at Exeter 
Hall on 30th June (reported in the appendix to his 
book on South Australia), though all the speakers, 
except Robert Owen and other dubious allies, merely 
reiterated the ideas he had instilled into them. By 
this time a change had taken place at the Colonial 
Office, and the new Minister, Mr Spring Rice, 
afterwards Lord Monteagle, a former schoolfellow 
of Wakefield's at Westminster, was not unfriendly. 
On condition of the promoters giving up their ambi- 
tion to be a chartered company, and consenting that 
their settlement should be established as a Crown 
Colony, he promised neutrality, though not active 
support. Not more than fifty members could be 
induced to vote upon the bill of the Association 
when, on 25th July 1834, the second reading was 
carried by thirty-three to seventeen. Four days after- 
wards a formidable opponent appeared in the represent- 
ative of the great house of Baring, who thought that 
the promoters might have sixty or a hundred square miles 
to operate upon 'somewhere,' but objected to trust 



ioo BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

them any further. Spring Rice, stung into animation, 
answered warmly, and the bill triumphed by seventy- 
two to seven. It is marvellous how so novel and 
important a measure could have escaped further dis- 
cussion in the Committee stage, which must have 
wrecked it at so late a period of the session. It was, 
in fact, read a third time on 2d August. Probably 
its opponents had calculated upon dealing it a fatal 
blow in the Lords, where its prospects were indeed 
most gloomy. c Opposition,' says Wakefield, £ threat- 
ened to prove fatal, because, though it was confined to 
a few peers, not a single one except the proposer of 
the bill' [the Marquis of Normanby] 'had any active 
good will towards our measure. The Ministers, how- 
ever bound by their colleague's promise of neutrality, 
would give no assistance in either House, and for a 
time the loss of the bill in the House of Lords seemed 
inevitable. In this extremity one of us' [Wakefield 
himself, with assistance from Mr R. D. Hanson and 
Matthew Davenport Hill] c thought of endeavouring 
to interest the Duke of Wellington in our favour. 
He assiduously examined our plan, came to the 
opinion that u the experiment ought to be tried," and 
then, with a straightforward earnestness that belongs 
to his nature, and with a prompt facility for which 
his great personal influence accounts, lifted our poor 
measure over all obstacles. In order to mark our 
gratitude to him, we intended, and told him so, that 
the metropolis of the new colony should bear his 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 101 

name, but this intention was shabbily frustrated by- 
some whom I abstain from mentioning.' " 

Thus the famous soldier, who won no territories for 
his country by his sword except in the East Indies, 
added to her by his parliamentary influence a domain 
then of 300,000 square miles, now of 900,000. 
Nothing was then certainly known of its capabilities, 
except that the banks of a great river seemed promis- 
ing for settlement. Now, although vast tracts in 
the interior must remain for ever barren, and the 
northern portion is only fit for Coolie labour, the 
mere fringe along the southern coast has two millions 
and a half acres under cultivation ; there are six 
millions and a half of sheep, exporting forty-seven 
millions of pounds of wool ; and nearly fifty million 
pounds worth of gold, silver and copper have been 
raised since the settlement of the colony. There are 
350,000 inhabitants, raising two millions and a half of 
revenue, and annually exporting products to the value 
of eight millions. There are nearly 2000 miles of 
railway, and half a million has been spent in bridging 
the whole Australian continent with a telegraph wire. 
When the railway shall have followed the telegraph, 
its northern and southern termini (the latter possibly 
Port Lincoln, on account of its splendid harbour) will 
become the two great entrepots of the Australian waters. 

14 They' (the Commissioners) 'sought profit by pleasing the King 
rather than honour by paying an honest debt.' — New Zealand Gazette, 
28th November 1840. Hence the courtly appellation, Adelaide. 



102 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

The great problems now before the colony seem to be 
to effect this junction, and to fill the northern regions 
with permanent Chinese or Indian settlers who will 
not seek to return to their own land. Much prejudice 
will have to be surmounted first, but prejudice cannot 
for ever obstruct the development of the colony, any 
more than it could its foundation. 

The act under which South Australia was con- 
stituted will be found in the appendix to Wakefield's 
handbook to the colony. It embodied his two chief 
articles of faith — the sale of land at a fixed price, 
which in this instance was not to be less than twelve 
shillings an acre, and might be more (Wakefield 
thought it ought to be a good deal more), and the 
application of the proceeds to an immigration fund. 
The introduction of convicts was entirely forbidden, 
and self-government was secured for the colony as 
soon as the population should amount to 50,000. It 
was a great blot in Wakefield's eyes that no provision 
was made for popular control over local expenditure in 
the interim ; and in other respects the act as originally 
proposed was grievously mutilated, while Wakefield 
was still less satisfied with the machinery appointed 
to carry it out. c The South Australian Act confided 
the business of colonization apart from Government 
to a commission, the members of which were to be 
appointed by the Crown — that is, by the Colonial 
Office. The commissioners were not to be paid. 
It was a grand point, therefore, to find three or four 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 103 

persons, masters of the theory, willing to undertake 
the task, and likely from their personal character to 
perform it under a strong sense of honourable re- 
sponsibility. Such persons were found, but were not 
appointed.' It may be plausibly and not quite untruth- 
fully suggested that Wakefield would have liked the 
commission to have been composed of his friends and 
disciples, whom he could guide at his will, instead of the 
new set that excluded him, and hinc ilia lacrima. The 
innuendo of Mr Angas's biographer that Wakefield 
turned his attention to New Zealand from having 
failed in his efforts to obtain a foremost place in 
colonizing South Australia, is supported by a remark 
of Wakefield's own. But on the other hand, the ten 
commissioners, with the exception of Torrens, Angas 
and Hutt, with their able secretary, Rowland Hill, seem 
to have been what Wakefield called them — amateurs; 
and Mr Angas was driven, by his impatience at their 
slowness in procuring the requisite funds, to establish 
a supplementary company to buy land at the tempor- 
arily reduced price of twelve shillings an acre, with the 
prospect of reselling it for twenty. The introduction 
of a speculative element was much to be deplored, but 
it at all events floated the commissioners into deep — 
into very deep — waters. It necessitated Angas's 
resignation of his seat on the commission. At this 
time (September 1835) Wakefield had been effectually 
ostracised, an experience destined to be repeated in 
the case of the New Zealand Company twelve years 



104 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

afterwards. The remarkable letter he wrote to 
the commissioners of 2d June 1835, from which a 
long extract has been made, reveals wide divergences 
of opinion, especially on the question of a sufficient 
price for land. Meanwhile, the colony had at least 
been set going, and, under Angas's direction, a ship, 
admitted by Wakefield himself to have served as a 
model for all subsequent enterprises of the kind, sailed 
in February 1836. A landing was effected in July, 
and the colony was formally constituted in December 
of the same year. 

Not only was the colony of South Australia the 
visible incarnation of Wakefield's idea, but its estab- 
lishment had cost him an enormous amount of literary 
and other labour. 

'The plan,' he tells the South Australian Com- 
missioners in 1835, 'has been defended in so large a 
number of pamphlets and books that a list of them 
would surprise you. 1 Now, all those books were 
written by me or by friends of mine ; while I also 
composed nearly the whole of the advertisements, 
resolutions, prospectuses and proposals, and of the 
applications, memorials, letters and replies to the 
Government, and other documents of any importance 
adopted by those three associations ' [the Colonization 



* Besides the one already mentioned, two of the most important 
were, Plan of a Company to be established for the purpose of founding a 
Colony in South Australia, 183 1. South Australia. Outline of the Plan of a 
Proposed Colony, 1834. 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 105 

Society and the South Australian Companies of 1831 
and 1834]. " c The draft of a charter submitted to the 
South Australian Association, and the Act of Parlia- 
ment which was substituted for that proposed charter, 
were drawn by a near relative of mine ' [his brother 
Daniel] l under my immediate superintendence. As 
I was concerned in the formation of those three 
societies, so with each of them I held constant com- 
munication, partly by means of frequent interviews 
with some leading members of their committees, 
partly by almost daily conversation or correspondence 
with some person or other who represented my 
opinions, informed me of whatever was done or pro- 
posed, conveyed suggestions which I wished to make, 
and resisted, with arguments agreed on beforehand, 
all sorts of endeavours to alter the plan of colonization 
which I had formed. By entering more into detail 
I could readily satisfy you that in the steps which led 
to the passing of the South Australian Act I have had 
even a more constant and active participation than 
appears by this general statement.' 

Tantce molts erat Romanam condere gentem ! Can 
there after this be any doubt as to the identity of 
the founder of South Australia ? The services of Mr 
George Fife Angas were such as to justify much 
enthusiasm on the part of a biographer, but the limits 
of truth and soberness are preposterously exceeded 
when he is styled on the title-page of the record of 
his life * father and founder of South Australia.' To 



106 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

be the father of anything one must have begotten it ; 
and a founder' must at least have laid the first stone. 
For anything that appears in Mr Hodder's biography, 
Mr Angas took little interest in South Australia until 
the receipt, on 31st March 1832, of the prospectus 
of the South Australian Land Company, drafted by 
Wakefield. In fact, his biographer does him injustice, 
for his name appears on the committee of 1831. He 
does not reappear upon the committee of the associa- 
tion of 1834, and, although appointed one of the com- 
missioners under the Act, beyond lending his advocacy 
to principles which Wakefield had enunciated years 
before, he does not seem to have taken any prominent 
part until, in the autumn of 1835, and consequently 
a year after the passing of the Act, the threatened 
stagnation of the enterprise for want of the circulating 
medium led him to pledge his credit to the associa- 
tion he established to provide the lacking funds. A 
spirited act, but the act of a founder not of a colony, 
but of a company. Curtius highly distinguished 
himself by plunging into the gulf, but he did not 
thereby become Romulus. Happily, in a work where 
he may be supposed to have written with greater 
freedom, 1 Mr Hodder, recognising, like the York- 
shireman who got credit for killing the bear, that 
c mother helped a bit,' calls up three other founders 
to share the honours formerly monopolised by Mr 

1 History of South Australia, vol. I, p. 46. The date of Mr Hodder's 
biography of Angas is 1891, that of his History 1893. 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 107 

Angas ; — Wakefield, Gouger and Colonel Torrens. 
Gouger, according to Mr John Stephens, a contem- 
porary authority, had worked with indefatigable per- 
severance to launch the colony ; and Torrens, the 
first ostensible head of the undertaking, and long 
chairman of the commissioners, was fully entitled to 
claim, as he did, the honour of having c planted ' it. 
His name should not have been excluded from the 
just — except as it ignores Wakefield's superhuman 
activity as scribe and wirepuller — estimate of the 
respective services of Wakefield and Angas in Garran's 
Australian Atlas, c Two names are conspicuous above 
all others in the history of the early settlement. They 
are those of Edward Gibbon Wakefield and George 
Fife Angas. To the former belongs the honour of 
devising a new method of successful colonization, and 
to the latter that of being chiefly instrumental in 
bringing it to the test of actual experiment. Mr 
Wakefield was a political economist and a reformer 
in the best sense of the term, and Mr Angas a colonist 
of exactly the right stamp.' 

How Wakefield's circle looked upon South Australian 
affairs is vividly shown by the most lovable and after 
him the most interesting of its members. His affec- 
tion and tender care for his child had not been unre- 
quited. It was his brief and frail happiness to possess 
one of the greatest blessings granted to man, a 
charming, gifted and devoted daughter who saw 
everything through his eyes, entered with enthusiasm 



10S BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

into his every project, and to whom her father's 
colony was at the time incomparably the most inter- 
esting spot on the face of the earth. She was in her 
seventeenth year, ardent, animated, impressionable, and 
endowed with the elevation of sentiment and precocity 
of intelligence which at so early an age often indicate 
that the root of life has not struck deep. In August 
1834 Nina Wakefield writes to her aunt, Catherine 
Torlesse, wife of the Vicar of Stoke-by-Nayland, 
Suffolk, Wakefield's favourite sister, a striking beauty 
and a woman of most solid worth : — T 

'In common with papa and Dodo' [Daniel], ' my 
mind has been so completely engrossed for the last six 
months with the old subject of a new colony that I 
have never been able to think of anything besides. 
You remember how hot we were about it when we 
last enjoyed the pleasure of seeing you (which is now 
two years and a half ago), and you must have heard 
how, shortly afterwards, our sanguine hopes of success 
were upset by His Majesty's Government, to the 
great damage of our loyalty. Well, then, you can 
easily imagine our joy, mingled with eagerness and 
anxiety, when, after another trial and another failure, 
the plan has at last met with the approbation of the 
new Colonial Minister, has been made law by the 
Parliament, and is certain of being carried into effect 
immediately. In the spring of 1832 I wrote you a 

1 I shall hardly find anybody whose example I should so much wish 
her to follow as yours,' he had written in 1822. 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 109 

letter telling you that the colonists were soon coming 
to the practical part of their scheme, and expressing 
the warmest wish of us all emigrating to Spencer's 
Gulph. I was wrong in thinking the termination of 
our toil was at hand ; we had to go through two 
more years of tedious expectation, harassing procras- 
tination, uphill labours and chilling disappointments, 
the very thoughts of which make me feel sick ; but 
at length we have triumphed over all our open and 
hidden foes, we are within an ace of the goal, nothing 
but a miracle can wrest the prize from us, and again, 
I hope more truly, I say the colonists are at the 
practical part of their work. In the meantime I have 
not changed my mind as to emigration ; I still wish 
very much to go out, especially if you were going, 
and even more than when I saw you. I have to tell 
you, as I suppose you have no means of knowing it 
before, that Dodo expects to obtain the appointment 
of judge-in-chief in South Australia, 1 in which case 
he turns colonist immediately. William also, who, 
now peace is restored in Portugal, has got nothing 
to do, and finds it a hard matter indeed to get paid 
for his former services, talks of leaving the Oueen's 
[Donna Maria's] service ; in which case, as Felix is 
already there, and Howard is sure to join them from 

1 Daniel did not come to judgment until twenty years afterwards, 
when he was appointed a judge in New Zealand. He had previously 
been Attorney-General of Wellington and the Middle Island under Sir 
George Grey, but resigned in consequence of his brother's opposition to 
the Governor's policy. 



no BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

India presently, there will be a nice party of our 
family at our antipodes. The more I think of it, the 
more I wish that Uncle Charles would give up his 
poor living and turn South Australian with you and 
all yours, including dear Priscilla ; for then I think 
papa might be persuaded to go too, and then what a 
nice party we should make ! — flying from straitened 
means and anxiety for your children in future, to 
plenty, large profits for yourself, and easy, happy 
prospects for all your family ! Have you read papa's 
England and America^ the third chapter especially ? 
If not, get it, read that part carefully, and then reflect 
on the happy opening formed by a new Colony for a 
man of small fortune and large family. Then get a 
little book called South Australia^ compiled and edited 
by papa. In it you will find full information on every 
point connected with the colony, and all I pray is 
that it may make some impression upon you. Tell 
Uncle Charles from me to read the chapter in the little 
book called " Inducements to Emigration." I wish 
I were at Stoke, for I am sure I could persuade him, 
and then if I succeeded we should have nearly the 
whole family of us joined together in South Australia ; 
for I take it for granted that if you went papa would 
go too, with both his chickens.' 

Girlish as this epistle is, it expresses the feelings 
then rife in many an English middle-class circle for 
which the mother country's bosom had become too 
dry, and her arms too narrow. Writing a month 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD in 

afterwards under less restraint, Nina thus pours out 
her feelings to her friend Rosabel Attwood, 1 in a 
strain that proves her indeed her father's daughter. In 
truth, there is nothing in the Letter from Sydney to 
rival this vivid realisation of scenes beheld only by the 
gaze of imagination through the glass of description. 

1 Hare Hatch, 2 \th Sept. 1834. 

< My dear Rosabel, — . . . When we took 
leave of you ten days ago, I was afraid that we 
should not meet again for many months, but I hear 
there is a possibility of your family all turning 
South Australians at once, in which case, as I am 
trying hard to persuade my father to the same 
thing, and feel pretty sure of success, we may cal- 
culate on the chance of meeting again very soon, 
and probably of going all in one party. If so (of 
which, as I am naturally sanguine, I feel certain 
already), we shall have a second set of happy days 
on shipboard and in South Australia. If " Victoria " 
is built on the shores of Port Lincoln, we can have 
regattas in the large harbour and donkey excursions 
to Sleaford Mere on the Louth Hills, and if Lake 
Alexandrina be fixed upon as the site of the new 

1 Daughter of Thomas Attwood, M.P., founder of the Birmingham 
Political Union, whose daughter Angela married Edward Gibbon Wake- 
field's brother Daniel. His life has been written in a privately printed 
volume by his grandson, Charles Marcus Wakefield. 

2 Near Reading, the seat of Edward Gibbon's uncle Daniel, who was 
engaged at the time on Mr Attwood's side in the celebrated case of 
Small v. Att-zoood, which he gained. 



ii2 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

city, the large lake itself and the beautiful glens 
and valleys of the promontory of Cape Jones seem 
made on purpose for our parties of pleasure. But 
that which above all would please you, who are of 
an imaginative turn of mind, is an exploring expedi- 
tion into the interior of the country. I have heard 
you talk of the pleasure of stepping on a shore 
on which no one had been before yourself, but un- 
fortunately for that idea, there have been so many 
navigators, sealers, runaway convicts, etc., on that 
coast that you cannot feel sure of treading an 
unbeaten track, and the only way of standing where 
white man never stood before is to be one of the 
exploring party which will be sent, immediately after 
the landing of the people, up the country to discover 
and survey it. The explorers travel through forests, 
across rivers, and over vast plains, which have never 
been seen before ; making maps and taking sketches 
as they go along ; amused at every mile with some 
new feature in the country they pass through, and 
every now and then enlivened by petty accidents 
or the jokes of the excited young people of the 
party. An exploring expedition is like a donkey 
excursion on a large scale, but you have the extra 
satisfaction of knowing that you run the risk of 
some little danger, and that you are enjoying a 
pleasure which cannot be enjoyed by anybody in 
England. Think of standing on a high hill and 
looking for leagues in every direction without seeing 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 113 

a human being, or any animal except a few quiet 
kangaroos and emus, and hearing no noise but the 
rustling of the trees and the bubbling water of the 
little cascade at the foot of the hill, or the bustle 
of your party pitching their tents for the night on 
the hillside, and preparing for supper a fat Wallabee 
kangaroo which one of the sportsmen of the party 
shot that morning as they were traversing some 
beautiful grass plains. To pursue this picture. 
Having looked on till the sun has set, and the 
moon (aided by a set of stars totally different to 
those to which you have been accustomed in this 
hemisphere) has risen to light you to bed, you hear 
a voice from the tent, " Supper is ready." You run 
back, having had your appetite sharpened by a long 
ride on a rough-haired pony, or perhaps a gallop 
after a long-legged emu, and the whole party sit 
down on the grass under the tent, and, making 
their laps serve as tables, make an excellent supper 
on the haunch of poor Wallabee. After supper 
someone asks you for a song ; you give one in 
your best style, making your shrill voice echo 
through the adjoining forests, and frightening the 
poor variegated parrots who have gone to roost in 
the trees there. In token of the gratitude of the 
party for your condescension, the captain of the 
expedition proposes that the hill on which you are 
going to pass the night be called after you ; all 
present instantly assent ; a glass of wine is poured 



ii4 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

on the grass at the entrance of the tent, the party 
rise and give three hearty cheers, and the captain 
proclaims that henceforth the hill shall be called 
Mount Rosabel. We mark it so on the map ; a 
short speech of thanks from you succeeds, and then 
all go to rest, undisturbed by the howling of the 
native dogs, who are kept off by the fear of your 
firearms, and sleep till you hear the captain's bugle 
next morning, when you jump up, breakfast, strike 
your tents and set off again, and so on till after 
a few weeks' absence you return to headquarters 
with all your zoological, botanical, geological and 
topographical discoveries. How do you like this 
idea of an exploring party ? 

i As for our occupations and amusements on board 
ship, they will be manifold, and as neither you nor 
I mean to be sea-sick, we shall make ourselves very 
comfortable. But I hope that you will make up 
your minds quickly to going out, for remember it 
is not safe or pleasant to leave England between 
the 20th of October and the beginning of January, 
so that, as I am almost sure of going with papa in 
October, we shall not have the pleasure of forming 
one party on the voyage unless you make very great 
haste in your preparations, which, by-the-bye, are 
different in their magnitude when you are going to 
the other side of the world to when you are taking 
a trip to a watering-place. But I hope and trust 
that you will be ready by the 20th of October, 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 115 

and we will all sail together, singing merrily, "The 
deep, deep sea ! " I have been thinking that, as 
your eldest brother is a poet and you are a musician, 
you ought to consult with him on writing a national 
song for us South Australians, and setting it to some 
popular and spirited tune. Let the first verse be 
the invocation of " the future sons of Australia " to 
their mother to raise a future empire on the shores 
whither the blue waves of the Southern Ocean 
are bearing them along ; then go on to describe, 
in the following verses, the landing of the colonists, 
the occupations to which they betake themselves, 
and the gradual rising of the city on the waste and 
barren coast, bringing in descriptions of the excite- 
ment and ambition of the settlers, and ending each 
verse with a spirited chorus on the model of "The 
Parisienne." Let the tune be grand, but simple 
and marked, so that every South Australian may 
easily learn it and sing it both on the voyage and 
on shore ; for we must practise a great deal or 
music, as it keeps the people in good humour ; so 
we will have concerts and private theatricals on 
board ship, balls and musical festivals on land, but 
no raffles or wheels of fortune. 

C I have written you a long rambling letter, for 
which I should apologise, but that I know that the 
soberest spirits are apt to run wild on the exciting 
subject of the new colony, and moreover, that you 
also are much interested in the same subject. I have 



n6 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

not written you any directions concerning Beau, as 
I had at first intended, in consequence of the length 
of this epistle, but I hope that you will not allow him 
to neglect his exercise, as he is a lazy fellow, and will 
take every advantage of your indulgence. Pray give 
my best love to your mother and sister, remember 
me kindly to your father and brother ; give Beau 
two pats on the back and a kiss on the nose from 
me ; present my best respects to Dash and the parrot - } 
and give my kind regards to Miss Cecilia Clock.' 

Alas ! poor Nina was to take a longer journey. 
This letter, so full of brilliant youthful spirits, is dated 
4th September. On 18th October, two days before 
the day on which she had pictured herself as embark- 
ing, her distracted father writes to Mrs Attwood : — 

'Though I do not like to leave Rosabel's letter 
unanswered, I cannot write to her. She is too young 
to be told of my wretched feelings, and I cannot hide 
them. Besides, my dear Nina talks of her very often 
with a strong affection, which you will see is natural 
when I tell you that she was never intimate with any 
other girl at all near her own age ; and thus I am 
unmanned only by thinking of her. 

1 My dear child is declared to have a mortal com- 
plaint of the lungs. Two or three months is all the 
time that I can expect to keep her in England ; but 
a vague hope is held out to me that a warm climate 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 117 

may save her. Of course I am on the point of 
removing her ; but of giving her even that poor 
chance I am not sure, so great is her weakness, and 
rapid the sinking of all her bodily powers. She is 
reduced to a skeleton, but is patient, cheerful, rational 
and fearless. Heartbroken myself, I am obliged to 
laugh and play with her as when she was quite well. 
You will see why I cannot write to Rosabel, and will 
excuse me for indulging, while writing to you, in 
these expressions of grief. It is a sort of comfort to 
me to imagine that you will feel with as well as for 
me. Yet what right have I to give you the pain of 
sympathising with me ? None, nor can I tell why I 
inform you of my misery, unless it be that my only 
present consolation is the number of people who have 
shed tears at the thought of never seeing my darling 
again. 

4 1 have but just left her at the seaside, and am 
hurrying to make arrangements for our departure — 
to what distance must depend on her state. If Mr 
Attwood be with you, pray give my kind regards to 
him, as well as to your children. Accept yourself my 
grateful thanks for your kind attentions to my poor 
child, believing me to remain very truly and faithfullv 
yours, E. G. Wakefield.' 

They went to Lisbon. The following letter, which 
must have been written from that city, bears the 
London postmark of 3d February : — 



n8 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

' My dear Mrs Attwood, — Yesterday my dear 
child, becoming aware of her danger, wished to write 
to several friends by dictating to me. A letter to her 
brother so much exhausted her that she could proceed 
no further, but she desired me to write in her name to 
those whom she could not but neglect, and amongst 
them to Rosabel. It is only to keep my promise to 
her that I send this scrawl, so that I may tell her 
when she wakes that I have done what she desired. 
She is sinking fast. All hope has been at an end for 
some weeks.' x 

Nina died at Lisbon on 12th February 1835. On 
14th April, Wakefield wrote to his sister : — 

1 More than once of late I have tried in vain to 
write to you, and I should not have got courage to do 
so now if I had not promised to convey to you the 
kindest expressions of regard which were uttered by 
dear Nina on the very last day of her life. It was 
only then that she became entirely conscious of her 
situation. She desired me to give you a lock of her 
hair, and to tell you that in her last moments she 
thought of you with the tenderest affection. Indeed, 
the prospect of dying seemed to strengthen the strong 
love which she bore to all whom she loved at all. She 
forgot nobody of those for whom she had ever felt a 
regard. Of you she spoke frequently, and made for 

1 ' I love her so much that I am sure almost that I shall be deprived 
of her,' he had written in Nina's infancy. 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 119 

you with her poor starved hands a little packet of her 
hair, which I shall send to you when I am able to 
open the box that contains it. I have nothing more 
to say. As you did not know her when she was no 
longer a child, when she had become my friend and 
partner in every thought and object of interest, you 
cannot sympathise with me, you cannot estimate my 
loss. The vulgar notion of death has no terrors for 
me ; but I feel half dead myself, having lost her for 
whom alone of late years I have lived. The world 
seems a blank. But probably, as usually happens in 
such cases, I shall find other objects of interest. To 
make a beginning, I intend that henceforth Edward 
shall live with me.' 

A living memorial of his daughter accompanied 
Wakefield from Lisbon, a little Portuguese girl, whose 
playfulness had cheered the sufferer's last days, and 
whom he begged from her parents. He educated her and 
sent her out to New Zealand, where she married well. 

This domestic tragedy, and the absence from Eng- 
land which it necessitated, doubtless weakened Wake- 
field's hold upon South Australian affairs, and perhaps 
accounts in some measure for the suppression of his 
friends and himself in their management. At the time 
he must have felt the slight bitterly, but it proved a 
most fortunate circumstance, allowing him to devote 
his attention to a new enterprise in New Zealand, 
where, as will be seen, his interposition was urgently 
necessary, not merely to introduce improved methods 



120 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

of colonization, but to preserve this Southern Britain 
for the English race. It was also most fortunate that 
he thus escaped responsibility for the initial difficulties 
and failures of South Australian colonization, which 
would have been attributed to him if he had taken 
any active part in it. Indeed, those were not want- 
ing who charged them upon the Wakefield system, 
but the groundlessness of the accusation is apparent, 
not only from the unanimous testimony of South 
Australian historians, one personal adversary excepted, 
but from the proceedings of the Parliamentary Com- 
mittee which sifted the matter in 1841. It is 
sufficiently plain that, on the other hand, the disasters 
arose from neglect of Wakefield's principles. The 
land surveys proceeded so slowly that the 'colonists 
could not get upon the soil ; concentrated about 
Adelaide, they consumed without producing all the 
necessaries of life, sold at fabulous prices ; and famine 
might have supervened but for the unexpected and 
welcome discovery that cattle could be driven a 
thousand miles through the bush from New South 
Wales. When the colonists got to work, South 
Australia immediately became a wheat exporting 
colony ; and a further impulse was given by the 
public works undertaken by the new Governor, 
Colonel Gawler. Unfortunately Gawler's zeal far 
outran his means ; the bills he drew on London 
were dishonoured, and general bankruptcy seemed 
to impend. The temporary revival, moreover, had 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 121 

generated a reckless land speculation, the character 
of which may be appreciated from the single circum- 
stance that Mr Angas's agent drew upon him for 
^28,000, expended in buying an estate without any 
authority. 1 The very magnitude of the trouble 
saved the colony by compelling the Home Govern- 
ment to come to its assistance by advancing funds, 
and abolishing the unsatisfactory system of government 
by commissioners. Captain (afterwards Sir George) 
Grey, already renowned as an Australian explorer, 
was sent out to govern, and by harsh but salutary 
retrenchments, including a nobly self-sacrificing re- 
duction of his own salary, kept the colony afloat 
until the discovery of the Kapunda and Burra Burra 
copper mines brought it the capital needed for a 
career of prosperity. 

These incidents, it is manifest, had nothing to do 
with the Wakefield system, which obtained the most 
unqualified approval of the Parliamentary Committee, 2 

1 Mr Angas was nearly ruined, but rode out the storm. The estate 
ultimately justified the anticipations of the sanguine purchaser, and Angas 
died upon it at an advanced age in wealth and honour. 

2 The proceedings of this Committee were reviewed in the Edinburgh 
Review for April 1842 by James Spedding, and, he being called away to 
the United States as private secretary to Lord Ashburton, the article was 
revised by Henry Taylor. Jeffrey says, in writing upon it to Napier the 
editor: 'To one who looks, as I do, to those regions as the destined seat 
of another and a greater Britain, from which the whole Eastern world is 
hereafter to be ruled in freedom and happiness, no subject can possibly be 
more interesting and important.' It is interesting to meet this anticipa- 
tion of the title of Sir Charles Dilke's famous book twenty-six years 
before the publication of the latter. Sir Charles, however, did not derive 
it from Jeffrey, whose letter was not published until 1879. 



122 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

and has given perfect satisfaction in the colony itself. 
After quoting a disparaging passage from Mr Samuel 
Sidney, author of a cheap colonial handbook published 
in 1852, Mr Anthony Foster remarks: 'That senti- 
ments such as these might have been written by some 
prejudiced or splenetic historian in 1840, when 
South Australia was suffering from difficulties incident 
to the settlement of a new country, might easily be 
imagined ; but that they could be written at a period 
when the success of the principles upon which the 
colony was originally founded was apparent to every- 
body, is somewhat astonishing. There has never 
been, in South Australia, any doubt as to the wisdom 
of appropriating a large proportion of the proceeds 
received for the sale of waste lands to the importation 
of immigrants.' x Mr J. P. Stow, in his account of 
South Australia written for the Calcutta Exhibition of 
1883 by direction of the South Australian Govern- 
ment, observes : ' For the first two or three years delays 
in the survey of the country lands, official mismanage- 
ment, the unwise policy which induced the settlers to 
remain in Adelaide instead of going into the wilder- 
ness to attend to the rich soil, only waiting for the 
plough to make it yield bounteous harvests, prevented 
the Wakefield system from having fair play j but 
when there came a wise administration of public 
affairs, all that was propounded as the natural result 

1 South Australia, its Progress and Prosperity. By Anthony Foster, 
1866, pp. 12, 13. 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 123 

of the system came to pass.' Mr Stow adds, indeed, 
the important qualification, ' It worked well till the 
colony outgrew it.' We have already remarked on 
the enormous change created by the cheapening and 
acceleration of communication, which has superseded 
much that was admirable and necessary in 1834. 
Great rushes to a colony, moreover, such as those 
occasioned by gold discoveries, inevitably mar one of 
the most valuable features of the Wakefield system, 
the equal representation, by a judicious selection of 
immigrants, of all classes of the mother country, from 
the highest to the lowest. 1 But if it was rather for 
an age than for all time in its practical operation, the 
system preserves an undying importance in history as 
the first attempt since the days of the Greeks at 
organised colonization on scientific principles, and as 
the agent by which vast tracts were reclaimed from 
the mere squatter, the beachcomber, the convict, the 
savage, and devoted to the enterprise and capital of 
the mother country as fields for the employment of 
her wealth and outlets for the relief of her poverty. 

In 1873 Lieutenant-Colonel Palmer, one of the 
original South Australian Commissioners, observ- 
ing that by the extension of the colony across the 
Continent the name of South Australia had become 

1 South Australia, a Wakefield colony which has escaped inundation 
by rushes of adventurers, ' was,' says Mr Walker [Australasian Democ- 
racy, p. 33), 'fortunate in her original settlers, and has always attracted 
a good class of emigrants.' Cause and effect. Yet she has the most 
democratic constitution of any colony. 



124 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

inappropriate, and that it possessed no memorial of its 
founder except the name of a harbour, memorialised 
the Colonial Secretary to alter its appellation to 
Central Australia, and to erect a monument to 
Edward Gibbon Wakefield. Two admirable pro- 
posals, which at the time, but not for ever, failed 
of their effect. 



CHAPTER V 

PROJECT FOR COLONIZATION OF NEW ZEALAND CON- 
DITION OF THE ISLANDS IN 1 837 THE NEW- 
ZEALAND ASSOCIATION THE CHURCH MISSIONARY 

SOCIETY — LORD DURHAM LORD HOWICK THE 

NEW ZEALAND COMPANY OBSTRUCTION FROM 

THE GOVERNMENT FIRST EXPEDITION 

'When they persecute you in one city, flee to 
another.' The salutary ingratitude of the South 
Australian Commissioners had prevented Wakefield 
from wasting his energies upon an undertaking at the 
time presenting no adequate outlet for them, and urged 
him to a new enterprise which he might hope not 
only to shape but to control. So late as December 
1835, indeed, he had not renounced all idea of active 
participation in the South Australian project. He tells 
his sister Catherine that the first ship is to sail next 
month, and adds : c I have half a mind to go myself 
for a year to tell the tale of the beginnings.' But 
that ship sailed without him, and if he had any 
intention of following in another, this must have 
Deen diverted by the highly important Parliamentary 
inquiry into Colonial Lands, under the chairman- 

"5 



126 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

ship of Mr (afterwards Sir) Henry George Ward, 
probably set on foot at his instigation, but before 
which, at all events, he was the most important 
witness. Its report, to which we shall have to 
recur, was a great victory for his ideas ; at present 
we have only to cite a passage from his evidence, 
showing distinctly in what direction his thoughts 
were tending. In the course of an eloquent ex- 
position of suitable fields for emigration, including 
the elevated interior of Ceylon, and what we now 
call British Columbia, he says : — 

c Very near to Australia there is a country which 
all testimony concurs in describing as the fittest 
country in the world for colonization ; as the most 
beautiful country, with the finest climate and the 
most productive soil, I mean New Zealand. It will 
be said that New Zealand does not belong to the 
British Crown, and that is true, but Englishmen 
are beginning to colonize New Zealand. New 
Zealand is coming under the dominion of the British 
Crown. Adventurers go from New South Wales 
and Van Diemen's Land, and make a treaty with 
a native chief, a tripartite * treaty, the poor chief 

1 So printed, but Wakefield must have said triplicate. He was evi- 
dently thinking of the remarkable deed, executed in triplicate, by which, 
on 6th June 1835, Mr John Batman conceived himself to have acquired, 
in consideration of certain blankets, knives, tomahawks, etc., the entire 
site of the future city of Melbourne from the chiefs Jagajaga, Cooloolock, 
Bungarie, Yanyan, Moowip and Mommarmalar, whose marks and seals 
are duly appended, and who must be supposed to have declared in the 
Australian language,'! deliver this as my act and deed.' One of the 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 127 

not understanding a single word about it ; but they 
make a contract upon parchment, with a great seal : 
for a few trinkets and a little gunpowder they obtain 
land. After a time, after some persons have settled, 
the Government begins to receive hints that there 
is a regular settlement of English people formed in 
such a place ; and then the Government at home 
generally has been actuated by a wish to appoint a 
governor, and says, " This spot belongs to England, we 
will send out a governor." The act of sending out a 
governor, according to British constitution, or law, or 
practice, constitutes the place to which a governor is 
sent a British province. We are, I think, going to 
colonize New Zealand, though we be doing so in a 
most slovenly, and scrambling, and disgraceful manner.' 
This evidence was given in June 1836. The step 
from denouncing the actual irregular colonization of 
New Zealand as slovenly to proposing an orderly and 
systematic method was so short, that Wakefield must 
have taken it in his own mind ere he had left the 
committee room. The effect of his words upon 
others was equally immediate. 'In consequence of 
that statement,' he told the New Zealand Committee 
of 1840, c a member of the committee ' (Mr F. Baring) 
1 spoke to me upon the subject, and afterwards other 
persons, and we determined to form an association.' 

three copies is exhibited in the Manuscript Room of the British Museum 
— the nearest modern representative of the bull's hide wherewith Dido 
encompassed the site of Carthage. 



128 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

To enlist influential support and organise the means 
of carrying the project out would evidently be a 
work of time, and it is not until May 1837 that we 
obtain unequivocal evidence of its being actually on 
foot. On 1 2th May Wakefield writes from his then 
residence in Hans Place, Chelsea, to his brother-in- 
law, the Rev. Charles Torlesse : — 

c I have set on foot a new measure of colonization 
on the principles which have worked so well for 
South Australia. The country is New Zealand — 
one of the finest countries in the world, if not the 
finest, for British settlement. A New Zealand 
Association is now in course of formation ; it will 
comprise a more influential body than that which 
founded South Australia. The colony, that is, the 
body of capitalists who will first emigrate, is already 
considerable, and comprises persons qualified for every 
occupation but one. We have no clergyman.' 
After dwelling on the grievousness of this de- 
ficiency, and exhorting Mr Torlesse to ferret out 
a suitable ecclesiastic, not ' unequally yoked ' — ' He 
must be a superior man, and if he have a wife she 
must be superior too ' — Wakefield continues : ' Cap- 
tain Arthur' [the third brother, born in 1799, and in 
Place's opinion ' the flower of the flock ' J ] ' thinks 

1 Arthur Wakefield, his nephew Jerningham says, * first went to sea 
at ten years of age, with a pay of £20 a year, and never afterwards occa- 
sioned his family the expense of a shilling. He never owed anybody a 
farthing, and yet always seemed to have money in his pocket for a 
generous purpose.' 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 129 

of commanding the first expedition, and my own 
thoughts are turned in that direction. For me, all 
will depend upon the manner in which the founda- 
tion shall be laid : if it be very good, superior to any 
other thing of the sort, then I become one of the 
builders of the superstructure.' 

On the same day Arthur Wakefield, a lieutenant 
in the navy, who, after serving twenty-five years 
with high credit in various parts of the world, had 
just seen sixteen other lieutenants put over his head, 
writes from his brother's house to Catherine Tor- 
lesse : — 

'You will recollect that I mentioned to you at 
Stoke that Edward had his eyes upon New Zealand. 
I am so far interested about it that I fancy I see an 
opening for useful and active employment. I have 
made up my mind to go, if not previously employed. 
I have been reading a great deal on the subject, and 
am delighted with the accounts of the country. I 
think anybody you could enlist with the qualifications 
stated by Edward would receive very powerful aid in 
the furtherance of his objects, although they would 
probably be advanced more from philanthropic motives 
than religious ones. The influence is great which 
will be brought to bear in establishing the settlement, 
and I fancy it may become a very grand undertaking.' 

Arthur was right. The possibilities of New 
Zealand were unlimited, but it was a seed-field in 
great danger from its weeds. It will be convenient to 

I 



i 3 o BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

take a brief survey of its actual condition when the 
New Zealand Association came to the rescue. 

Colonization in New Zealand had one advantage 
over colonization in South Australia, that the capa- 
bilities of the country were well attested. None 
doubted or could doubt that the sombre, fern-covered 
land of silent evergreen forests, snowy peaks and boil- 
ing springs, inconspicuous for the floral growth of 
the soil, but brilliant with creepers and flowering trees, 
fulfilling in its strangeness and its charm the ideal of an 
antipodal country, was in the main fertile, pleasant 
and well- watered. Discovered by the Dutch in 1642, 
and afterwards more thoroughly examined by Cook, 
distance and the dread of its stalwart cannibal popula- 
tion had kept it from European intrusion until the 
settlement of New South Wales, when sealers and 
whalers began to frequent it, and by commercial inter- 
course paved the way for a drift of the worst and best 
elements of Australasian society ; convicts and mission- 
aries. The native population, according to their own 
tradition, arrived from the north-east, probably Tahiti, 
about the beginning of the fifteenth century, 1 and in 
the nineteenth was declining in numbers so seriously 



1 That they have been long separated from the other Polynesian tribes 
appears from the fact that although the kaiva plant grows in New 
Zealand, and is called by the same name as elsewhere, they had not 
learned to use it as a stimulant. It may, perhaps, be conjectured 
that kanva (which literally means bitter) is cognate with the Arabic 
kahiv'w y wine, probably in some other Semitic form the origin of oiyos 
and vlnunty and undoubtedly of our coffee. 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 131 

that, in the words of Mr Busby, the Resident, c the 
population is but a remnant of what it was in the 
memory of some European residents. All the apparent 
causes in operation,' he adds, 'are quite inadequate to 
account for the rapid disappearance of the people.' 
Everything invited the advent of a more vigorous race. 
Already, in 1825, a company had been formed with 
the support of Mr Huskisson, President of the Board 
of Trade, to colonize a large land-purchase near 
Hokianga, on the coast opposite to the Bay of Islands, 
perhaps the sanest speculation of that crazy year. 
The land, though legitimately acquired, remained 
unused, the leader of the expedition being intimidated 
by what he took for a war-dance of the natives, which 
others interpreted as a welcome. In 1829, the Duke 
of Wellington received a deputation on the subject, but 
he who was virtually to add South Australia to the 
empire then thought that 'we had enough colonies.' 
The issue thus lay between the company which 
Wakefield had so nearly brought to maturity in May 
1837, and the vis inertice of the British Government. 
A mass of information respecting the condition of 
New Zealand when the New Zealand Association 
commenced its operations is to be found in the report 
of the House of Lords Committee, 1838, presided over 
by the Earl of Devon. Much of it is ably digested 
in Surgeon-Major Thomson's instructive and enter- 
taining Story of New Zealand (1859). The Com- 
mittee, contrary to the wish of their chairman, 



1 32 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

made no recommendation on the subject of the 
extension of British authority over the country, 
holding this to be a matter of public policy to be 
decided by the Government, but the evidence they 
collected spoke sufficiently for itself. Population, as 
already stated, was on the decline. The European 
element, settled and afloat, consisted of seven classes, 
only one of which could be considered an entirely 
satisfactory contingent — 'beachcombers,' now familiar 
to the English reader in the pages of Stevenson and 
Louis Becke ; runaway convicts ; traders ; whalers ; 
sawers of kauri timber ; c Pakeha Maoris,' or tame 
whites maintained by the native chiefs, frequently 
loose characters, but pioneers of civilization in many 
ways ; and missionaries. It had to be owned with 
shame that evil had in general followed in the track of 
the white man. Where, as was frequently the case, a 
fine harbour was rendered useless by a bar, and whites 
accordingly came but sparingly, things were far more 
satisfactory than at the magnificent haven of the Bay 
of Islands, where ships could work in and out with any 
wind. There a town had sprung up named Kororareka, 
which in 1838 contained a floating European popula- 
tion of a thousand persons, with c a church, five hotels, 
numberless grog-shops, a theatre, several billiard tables, 
skittle-alleys, "finishes" and hells.' There was a 
British resident, 'a man-of-war without guns,' solely 
dependent upon his moral influence, and no other 
restraining force except the missionaries ; although 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 133 

the Committee had scarcely ceased its sittings when 
this very community of Kororareka, finding itself in 
danger of dissolution, established a Vigilance Com- 
mittee, made a sea-chest with gimlet holes do duty for 
a gaol, and arrayed minor malefactors in what Sydney 
Smith called c the plumeo-picean robe of American 
democracy.' One point of much importance, not 
sufficiently attended to, came out in the course of 
the investigation. The natives could not flee from 
these demoralising influences, for they were a nation 
of fishermen. They could not, like the inhabitants of 
other parts of the world, subsist by hunting, for there 
was nothing to hunt except rats. They had not 
generally learned to cultivate useful vegetables, and 
but for fish would have had little to live upon but fern 
roots, a diet which produced the same effects upon 
them as Mr Perceval, according to Peter Plymley, 
expected the prohibition of the export of prunes and 
senna to produce upon Napoleon's grenadiers. Hence 
they were confined to the coast line, exposed to 
contamination from the lowest class of Europeans, 
who must continue what they were until some 
government should be established capable of en- 
couraging the advent of decent people. Meanwhile, 
the cultivable lands in the interior remained waste, 
and the greater part of the Middle Island was almost 
uninhabited. Several courses lay before the Govern- 
ment. They might take the country over themselves 
as a Crown Colony ; they might grant the New 



134 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

Zealand Association a charter, like the East India 
Company ; they might recognise the independence 
of the native chiefs and govern them through the 
missionaries ; or they might wait until France 
annexed the islands, or the Vigilance Committee at 
Kororareka declared them an independent republic. 
This last course, the last which they could have 
wished to take, was the one to which their vacillation 
would have conducted but for the daring and deter- 
mination of Edward Gibbon Wakefield. 

Nervous shrinking from responsibility, and a dis- 
position to let things drift until difficulties have 
become dangers, are common faults of the official 
mind in all departments of State, and, until counter- 
acted by the recent development of Imperial senti- 
ment, were especially characteristic of the Colonial 
Office. To this must be added that the then 
Colonial Secretary, Lord Glenelg, was probably the 
weakest man who had ever held the post. He 
thought that the jealousy of foreign powers might 
be excited by the extension of British colonies ; that 
England had colonies enough ; that they were expen- 
sive to govern and manage, and not of sufficient 
value to be worth developing. Other influences, 
moreover, weighed with him and his far stronger 
Secretary, Sir James Stephen, by no means improper 
or discreditable in themselves, but to which they 
allowed undue weight. Both were fervent Evan- 
gelicals, and actually officials of the Church Missionary 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 135 

Society, of whose interests, as a consequence, they 
were exceedingly tender. Both were philanthropists, 
and, with very good reason, greatly dreaded the 
contact of Europeans with the natives. It was not 
in human nature that the missionaries should omit 
to take full advantage of the official bent of mind 
to protect what they had learned to regard as their 
special preserves in New Zealand. From their own 
point of view they had a strong case. They and they 
only had laboured to benefit the people. They had 
now been upwards of twenty years in the country, 
where they had originally gone at the risk of their 
lives, and the position they held in the esteem of the 
natives was entirely owing to their virtues and their 
beneficence. They had taught useful arts, in- 
troduced useful products, combated native diseases, 
too often derived from Europeans, with European 
medicines, laid the foundation of education, reduced 
the native speech to writing, translated the Scriptures 
into it, done much to abolish cannibalism and other 
barbarous practices, and made their own dwellings 
object-lessons of the beauty and advantage of a well- 
ordered home. Darwin writes on 30th December 
1835 : 'New Zealand is not a pleasant place. I look 
back to but one bright spot, and that is Waimate, 
with its Christian inhabitants.' At the same time 
they were open to criticism for having done so little 
to improve the domestic arrangements of the natives, 
and Captain Fitzroy could not but remark that they 



136 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

showed a comparative neglect of their white congre- 
gations. Doubtless they followed ' the line of least 
resistance,' and the fact explains their extreme 
repugnance to an extensive immigration of European 
settlers, who, even if moral and religious, might 
have little affection for a theocratic regime. The 
missionaries also had very good reason to fear that 
white colonists would soon get into land disputes with 
the natives, and that the latter when exasperated 
would make no nice distinctions between laymen and 
ecclesiastics of the obnoxious hue. The opposition, 
therefore, which found expression in the pamphlets 
(dated November 1837), one public, the other private 
and confidential, of Mr Dandeson Coates, lay secretary 
to the Church Missionary Society, was by no means 
unnatural, but must, nevertheless, be condemned as 
unpatriotic, ill-considered and short-sighted. It was 
unpatriotic, because it contested the sovereignty of 
Great Britain over a region of so much importance 
to her. It was ill-considered, because it failed to 
suggest any other remedy for admitted evils than the 
multiplication of consular agents as helpless as the 
existing Resident, and the stationing of a small coast- 
guard ship off the coast to awe delinquents on dry 
land. It was doubly short-sighted, inasmuch as, by 
denying Great Britain's right of sovereignty, it denied 
her jurisdiction over any of her subjects domiciled 
in the country who might choose to set up a republic 
little likely to be conducted agreeably to missionary 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 137 

principles ; and because it left the door open for 
French annexation, a real peril to which the mis- 
sionaries themselves awoke shortly afterwards. They 
certainly had a case in the deplorable results which 
had so frequently attended the contact between 
Europeans and aborigines ; but they ought to have 
seen that this contact was inevitable, and that the 
mischief could best be counteracted by a cordial 
understanding with the Association, whose interest 
in the well-being of the islands was not less than 
theirs ; the pity was that while one party wanted none 
but the best class of settlers, the other wanted none 
at all. Mr Coates frankly told the deputation from 
the Association which sought to conciliate him that 
i though he had no doubt of their respectability and 
the purity of their motives, he was opposed to the 
colonization of New Zealand in any shape, and was 
determined to thwart them by all the means in his 
power,' and ' exclude colonization,' or some equivalent 
phrase, continually occurs in his pamphlets. It may 
be guessed that other motives concurred which 
could not well be avowed. Mr Coates was obliged 
to acknowledge before the Committee that one 
effect of annexing New Zealand would be to open 
it to the evangelising efforts of the Propagation 
Society, whose charter restricted its operations to 
British possessions. No objection could decently be 
made to the introduction of another Christianising 
and civilising agency, but the Church Missionary 



138 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

officials were hardly likely to welcome a rival society 
with enthusiasm. 

That the New Zealand Association might well have 
gone hand in hand with any religious society appears 
from the most important evidence given on its behalf 
before the Lords' Committee. The soul of the 
company and its official head were absent with 
Wakefield and Durham in Canada, and it was chiefly 
represented by Dr Samuel Hinds, chaplain to Arch- 
bishop Whately, and afterwards Bishop of Norwich 
('almost the most agreeable and sensible man I have 
met,' says Arthur Wakefield in a letter to Catherine 
Torlesse), and by Dr G. S. Evans, a barrister versed 
in international law, not more of a Vattel than of a 
Stentor. Dr Hinds gave a luminous statement of the 
circumstances under which a civilised state is justified 
in extending its authority over barbarous countries, 
dwelt on the humane intentions of the Association 
towards the natives, and thus put the case against the 
Church Missionary Society from its own point of 
view : c A missionary station will spread Christianity 
immediately about ; but when you come to contem- 
plate the civilisation of a whole country you must look 
for a stronger and more effective measure. What 
the savage wants is to have before his eyes the ex- 
ample of a civilised and Christian community.' Mr 
Dandeson Coates's panacea, on the other hand, was 
the recognition of Maori New Zealand as an indepen- 
dent power. He pointed out that the chiefs and 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 139 

heads of tribes in the Northern Island, probably 
under the influence of the British agent, had already, 
on 28th October 1835, declared themselves a nation 
under the title of c the united tribes,' but he did not 
say, perhaps did not know, that this ridiculous farce 
had been denounced by the Governor of New South 
Wales as ' silly and unauthorised.' He could not deny 
that the missionaries themselves had petitioned for 
protection, to meet which necessity he recommended 
that the natives should be induced to adopt a code of 
laws, and that this New Zealand jurisprudence should 
be administered by a visiting judge from the Supreme 
Court at Sydney. Dr Evans, for the Association, easily 
showed that no respectable person could settle in the 
colony under such a system, unless he went with an 
armed party of squatters, without authority from the 
Crown. Still the Government deferred taking action, 
and it cannot be doubted that they were at heart hostile 
to all colonization. This jealous and unsympathetic 
attitude was the cause of all the early misfortunes of 
the colony, and of everything questionable in the pro- 
ceedings of the Association itself. If the Government 
could have found it in its heart to have treated the 
Association as Elizabeth treated the East India Com- 
pany, the difficult path to the existing prosperity of 
the colony would have been in comparison brief and 
easy. 

Apart from the testimony of these principal witnesses, 
the entire report of evidence has permanent historical 



140 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

value. It throws great light on the tribal customs 
and the difficulties connected with the transfer of 
land ; upon the resources of the country, not then 
adequately appreciated ; upon the simultaneous and 
corresponsive development of the organs of benevo- 
lence and of acquisitiveness among the missionaries. 
Mr Flatt, a discarded catechist, revealed that many of 
them had become great landholders and stockholders : 
'What meaneth this bleating of the sheep in mine 
ears ? and the lowing of the oxen which I hear r ' 
The most remarkable witness was a native named 
Nayti, who had been living some time in Wakefield's 
house, where he passed for a prince, but who on his 
return to his country was proved to be a man of low 
birth. His imposture, however, probably did not 
impair his trustworthiness as to the manners and 
customs of his countrymen. The last question asked 
him is : c How many children will a New Zealand 
woman have before she kills any ? ' To which he replies : 
' Some seven and some eight ; then they begin.' 

The endeavour to present a view of the condition 
of New Zealand at the commencement of regular 
British colonisation has carried us some time past the 
formation of the original New Zealand Association, 
which met for the first time at 20 Adam Street, 
Adelphi, on 22d May 1837, a day exactly midway 
between Carlyle's first lecture, 1st May, and Cooke 
and Wheatstone's first patent for the electric tele- 
graph. Its origination and initial proceedings are 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 141 

thus described by Wakefield in his evidence before 
the Parliamentary Committee of 1840 : — 

c We met and formed a society. The first 
principle which we laid down was that the society 
should be rather of a public than of a private 
character ; and that at all events no member of it 
should have any pecuniary interest in the object in 
view. The only object of the society was to bring 
the subject before the public and Parliament, and not 
to take any part as individuals in what might be the 
result. After putting forth to the public a printed 
pamphlet in which was published a statement of the 
objects of the society, the next step which they took 
was to get together a number of persons who wished 
to go out to New Zealand and settle there. Those 
persons formed themselves in a body, which may be 
properly called an intending colony. They were a 
body of people who separated themselves from society 
here, and formed themselves into a distinct society 
for the purpose of establishing themselves in New 
Zealand, provided the Association should succeed in 
its public object. As soon as this body was formed, 
which comprised a number of persons of some station, 
of good education and considerable property, the 
association made its first communication to the 
Government.' 

We must distinguish, therefore, between the 
Association formed for the purpose of promoting 
colonization, but whose members, united for a 



i 4 2 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

public object, were in this capacity entirely dis- 
interested persons, and the body of actual settlers 
constituted under its auspices. The plan 1 proposed 
to the Government contemplated the annexation of 
New Zealand and the entrusting of its administration 
for ten years to a council elected by the founders, 
which should have full authority, subject to disallow- 
ance by the Colonial Secretary and by Parliament, to 
whom its proceedings must be reported. 

The Association was indeed an influential body ; 
its first chairman, Mr Francis Baring, was of world- 
wide fame as a banker and merchant prince ; many 
of the directors were of the same type ; others were 
theoretical colonial reformers like Buller, Hutt and 
Molesworth. A name more calculated to impress 
the popular imagination was then in the background. 
Lord Durham returned from his St Petersburg 
embassy on 24th June, and forthwith joined the 
direction. The biography of this remarkable man 
is in the able hands of Mr Stuart J. Reid ; it will 
suffice for us to briefly describe him as an example 
of the patrician democrat whom the juxtaposition of 
caste and freedom have made more frequent in 
England than elsewhere, but of whom Alfleri is 
perhaps the standard type, an enthusiast for the rights 
of humanity in the abstract, disdainful of humanity 



1 The draft of the scheme will be found in the appendix to the 
report of the Committee of 1840, p. 163. 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 143 

as impersonated in individuals, too impatient of the 
mass of men to make a satisfactory colleague, and, 
though falling short of the intellectual superiority that 
would have made a great leader, in every thought and 
action magnanimous, disinterested and sincere. He 
was the only statesman of the day outside of Wake- 
field's immediate circle who had arrived at a con- 
ception of the Imperial character of the colonies, and 
differed even from these in so far that, while they 
mainly thought of colonization as a remedy for the 
ills of the State, Durham took it up rather on the 
positive side, and dreamed and more than dreamed of 
reviving the glories of Elizabeth. 'Through every 
page of his famous Report,' says Mr Egerton, in his 
recent interesting volume on British Colonial Policy^ 
1 there breathes a passion of Imperial patriotism, 
strange enough at the time.' The date of Wakefield's 
first acquaintance with Durham is uncertain. Had he 
known him in 1834 he would probably have suc- 
ceeded in interesting him in the South Australian 
project; and as in 1835 and 1836 Durham was 
mostly absent on his Russian embassy, it seems not 
improbable that Wakefield may have visited him at 
St Petersburg, a conjecture slightly supported by 
Wakefield's possession of Russian silver utensils given 
him by Durham. In any case, Durham's director- 
ship in the abortive New Zealand Company of 1825, 
and consequent claims to landed property in the 
islands, marked him out as a fit director of the new 



144 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

Association ; while his position as leader of the more 
advanced section of the Liberal party, to which almost 
all Wakefield's political friends belonged, and his 
prospect of the Premiership should this prevail, must 
have seemed more powerful recommendations still. 
But a serious drawback to his usefulness existed, for 
which he himself was in no way responsible. 

Wakefield and his friends had a great horror of the 
Colonial Office, which they looked upon as a demesne 
of the Church Missionary Society. In endeavouring 
to avoid Scylla they ran into Charybdis. They ad- 
dressed themselves to Lord Melbourne, the Prime 
Minister. Save for an honourable sense of public 
duty on especial occasions, Lord Melbourne was a 
second edition of Charles II., with more sense, dis- 
cernment and shrewdness than anybody about him, and 
less inclination than anybody to fatigue himself with 
dry details. He received the representatives of the 
Association graciously, and turned them over to Lord 
Howick, afterwards Earl Grey, then Secretary at War. 
But for Lord Durham's connection with the Association 
this might have been a judicious step. Lord Howick 
was a very remarkable person, a true statesman and 
excellent administrator, whose weight of character 
and fearless candour made him at a patriarchal age 
a valuable counsellor on public affairs long after his 
retirement from active political life. But he had the 
worst temper of any statesman of his age except Roe- 
buck, was in some measure estranged from Lord 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 145 

Durham, who was his brother-in-law, and, in Wake- 
field's opinion, was embittered against Wakefield him- 
self, by old misunderstandings concerning the South 
Australian scheme, aggravated at a later period by Lord 
Durham's rejection on Wakefield's advice of a plan of 
Howick's for the administration of Canada. 1 Wake- 
field's statements on this point {Art of Colonization, pp. 
27, 28) having never been admitted or contradicted by 
Earl Grey, remain ex parte, and Grey always denied 
that he had given the Association reason to expect his 
aid. That he did become hostile is as certain as it 
is lamentable. An alliance between him and Wake- 
field would have done more for the colonial empire of 
Britain than any other of the many excellent things that 
might have been. If Wakefield could effect so much 
by the aid of opponents or dubious supporters of the 
Ministry, what might he not have achieved with the 
support of a Minister like Howick, who could have 
had carte blanche, the Church Missionary Society and 
its acolytes in Downing Street notwithstanding ? Un- 
fortunately Howick, though a most able man, was not, 
like Wakefield, a man of original ideas. Wakefield 
wrote truly of him : c With more than a common 
talent for understanding principles, he has no origin- 



1 Wakefield writes to Lord Durham in February 1839: 'Though 
one should think it was just over, the time is now come for your receiv- 
ing all sorts of suggestions as to the best mode of settling affairs in 
Canada. Every man who has a scheme will hope to persuade you to adopt 
a bit of it. But Lord Howick would substitute a whole plan of his own 
for the whole of your plan.' 

K 



146 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

ality of thought — which compels him to take all his 
ideas from somebody ; and no power of working out 
theory in practice — which compels him to be always 
in somebody's hands as respects decision and action.' 
Wakefield, parentally affected towards the ideas which 
he had himself evolved, welcomed as an angel from 
heaven anybody who would help to translate them into 
facts. Howick, uninspired and critical, was unable to 
put aside the dislikes and prejudices which beset him 
from the first, or to see that much ought to be for- 
given to the faulty persons or faulty companies by which 
such conceptions were to be realised. Thus he lost 
the fame he might have had as a builder of the Empire, 
and ranks only among its eminent administrators. 

Durham's support, nevertheless, for a time helped 
the Association much in the same way as Howick's 
might have done. The Government, fearful of his 
heading an ultra-Liberal secession, was disposed to 
humour him in a matter so comparatively unim- 
portant as the foundation of a colony. Before his 
return from Russia, a draft of the proposed bill had 
been submitted to Lord Howick, who took objections 
and proposed amendments, all of which, Wakefield 
declares, whether approved or not, were accepted to 
conciliate his support. The death of the King on 
20th June, and the consequent dissolution, deferred 
further negotiations until the winter ; but the Asso- 
ciation was not idle, and in October a little treatise 
called The British Colonization of New Zealand^ partly 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 



H7 



written and partly compiled by Wakefield, was issued 
from its office in Adelphi Terrace Chambers. The 
larger portion of the book is devoted to a description 
of the islands, but it has also a valuable account of the 
system of government proposed by the Association, a 
sketch of the method to be followed in the application 
of the Wakefield system of land sale, and an appendix 
(by the Rev. Montague Hawtrey) on the principles to 
be observed in intercourse with the natives, which 
Wakefield justly terms £ beautiful.' Another chapter, 
written by Dr Hinds, holds out hopes of the appoint- 
ment of a bishop, which, to say nothing of the attend- 
ant spiritual advantages, 'will obviously increase the 
respectability of the colony.' No religion and no 
respectability, however, could conciliate the mis- 
sionary party. Mr Dandeson Coates attacked the 
Association and its scheme in the two pamphlets 
already referred to, to which Wakefield replied in 
another (dated 12th December), pointing out that 
colonization of a very undesirable sort was proceeding 
already, and that Mr Coates virtually proposed a 
scheme of colonization himself. 

Mr Coates's influence with Lord Glenelg appeared 
to be paramount when, on 9th December 1837, a 
deputation from the Association was again received 
by Lord Melbourne, and this time Lord Glenelg was 
present. c Lord Melbourne, who appeared to have 
forgotten what had passed on the former occasion, 
referred to Lord Glenelg. Lord Glenelg, without 



148 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

any reference to what had passed before, stated, partly 
from memory and partly by reading from a paper, a 
number of objections, which, if they had been valid, 
would be quite fatal to the scheme. He objected to 
it on almost every possible ground. It appeared then 
to the members of the Association that they had been 
rather hardly treated in being allowed to proceed as 
they had done in encouraging the public to prepare 
a colony for emigration to New Zealand. One of 
them was described to Lord Melbourne as having 
taken steps with a view to emigration, and as being 
likely to suffer very seriously from now finding him- 
self not able to carry his plan into effect. Lord 
Melbourne, not knowing that he was present, said 
that he must be mad. The gentleman got up and 
said that he was the madman. All this excited a good 
deal of feeling.' Within a week, however, a complete 
change seemed to have come over the mind of the 
Government. Lord Glenelg received another deputa- 
tion at the Colonial Office, to which he declared that 
the Government would grant the Association a charter 
of incorporation on condition of its transforming itself 
into a joint-stock company. To this the directors, 
who had made it the very foundation of their scheme 
that they should have no pecuniary interest in it, 
declined to agree. 

The objection was doubtless sincere, yet it can be 
no breach of charity to conjecture that even stronger 
objections may have been thought to apply to other 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 149 

propositions of Lord Glenelg's conveyed in a letter 
to Lord Durham, dated 29th December. The first 
portion of this letter, by admitting, on the strength of 
despatches stated to have been just received, the 
absolute necessity of establishing British authority in 
New Zealand, threw the case of the Church Mis- 
sionary Society overboard, but it went on to restrict 
the Association's area of occupation, to reserve the 
right of incorporating new companies, and to prohibit 
purchases of land from the natives without the assent 
of a Government Commissioner — a reasonable proposal 
if the Government and the Association worked hand 
in hand and agreed on first principles, but which 
might otherwise nullify its power to make any invest- 
ments. An able reply signed by Durham, but 
evidently drafted by Wakefield, was returned next 
day ; and after further correspondence between the 
two peers, which Wakefield says was too confidential 
to be made public, the Association determined to 
introduce a bill to carry out its objects on their 
original basis. In taking this step it professed itself 
confident of the support of Lord Howick, who, having 
seen the original draft of the project (and not, as he 
afterwards mistakenly alleged, an abstract of it), and 
having returned it with amendments accepted by the 
Association and incorporated in their new bill, was 
thought to have incurred a moral obligation to 
support it. He denied the existence of any such 
obligation. Wakefield had apparently the best of 



150 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

the argument before the Committee of 1840 ; it 
nevertheless appears to us that the expectation of Lord 
Howick's support was a kind of Mambrino's helmet 
which the Association put up for a show, but took 
care not to test. The bill was not introduced until 
June 1838, when Lord Durham and Wakefield were 
both in Canada. It was thrown out by 92 to 32, 
Lord Howick and Sir George Grey leading the 
opposition on behalf of the Government. As this 
destroyed all hope of the scheme being adopted in its 
original and preferable shape, the Association deter- 
mined to dissolve, and reconstitute itself as a joint- 
stock company. 1 All its expenses had hitherto been 
defrayed by Dr Evans and Wakefield from their 
private means, and had amounted to about a thousand 
pounds apiece. Compensation was voted to them. 
Evans, who had a family, very justifiably accepted it. 
Wakefield declined to receive a penny. 

The chief ostensible ground on which the Govern- 
ment had opposed the bill of the Association had been 
c the want of an actual subscribed capital,' to obviate 
which it was necessary for the Association to con- 
descend to the status of a joint-stock company. 

1 In Thomson's Story of New Zealand, it is stated, on the authority 
of an anonymous colonist, that this dissolution was occasioned by a dis- 
pute, developed at an entertainment given by Lord Durham to the 
Association, whether the administration of the company's settlements 
in New Zealand should be conferred upon Wakefield or Major Campbell. 
The groundlessness of the tale is proved by the fact that both Wake- 
field and Lord Durham were in Canada at the time. 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 151 

Durham and Wakefield were still in Canada, but 
provision had no doubt been made for the emergency. 
In October the 'private and confidential ' prospectus 
of the New Zealand Colonization Company was 
issued, with a paid-up capital of ^250,000, and power 
to extend it to half a million. The names on the 
directorate were principally of City men, and the 
element of colonial reform was barely represented. 
In fact, the mission of this new company was no 
more than to form a rallying point for intending 
emigrants, and prepare the next year's expedition. 
Much subterranean activity was no doubt rife, but 
the company made no overt demonstration until 
March, by which time interesting incidents had 
occurred. Much had been heard before the Lords' 
Committee of the proceedings of a French adventurer, 
the Baron de Thierry, who had claims to land in 
New Zealand, worthless in themselves, but quite 
good enough for the French Government to buy if 
it desired to set up a claim to the country. The 
Baron's brother, seeking support in England, called 
upon Mr Angas, of South Australian reputation, who, 
justly alarmed at what he elicited, wrote to Lord 
Glenelg, forcibly pointing out the necessity of 
prompt action. His advice was to proclaim British 
authority in New Zealand without further delay, 
and the neglect with which it was treated affords, 
unintentionally on his part, for he was no friend to 
the New Zealand Company, the fullest justification 



152 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

of the latter's subsequent action. 1 The feeble 
Glenelg was removed by his own colleagues in Feb- 
ruary, and was succeeded by Lord Normanby, a 
nobleman who had earned an enviable reputation for 
tact and conciliatory spirit as Lord Lieutenant of 
Ireland, and might therefore have made an excellent 
colonial governor, but was far below the calibre of a 
Secretary of State. On 4th March the Colonization 
Company addressed him, pointing out that the 
conditions required by Government had been com- 
plied with, to which Lord Normanby replied that 
they had been rejected once, and that the Govern- 
ment was free from all responsibility. In plain 
English, the Government had broken with Lord 
Durham, and were no longer afraid of him. Silence 
ensued until 27th April, when the company, now de- 
veloped into a c New Zealand Land Company,' formed 
by the amalgamation of the Colonization Company, 
the old Association, and the Company of 1825, 

1 Rodder's Life of G. F. Angas^ pp. 208-212. The real motive of 
the Government's opposition, w'j inertia and horror of colonial ex- 
tension apart, is naively intimated in a passage from Mr Angas's 
diary : 'If it were possible to get a hundred pious persons to advance 
£1000 each, I think Lord Glenelg would give them a charter.' 
Dr Dunmore Lang, the eminent New South Wales colonist, published 
four letters to Lord Durham recommending immediate annexation, and 
the honour of preserving New Zealand for Britain is awarded to him 
in the Dictionary of National Biography. But as his pamphlet was 
published in July 1839, and the company's expedition had sailed in May, 
he was but knocking at an open door as concerned Lord Durham, 
although his letters were no doubt serviceable as a stimulus to public 
opinion. 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 153 

Lord Durham in its chair, and a paid-up capital of 
a hundred thousand pounds in its pocket, gave a 
splendid dejeuner, accompanied with much oratory, 
at Lovegrove's Tavern at the West India Dock. 
On 29th April the Colonial Secretary was the dis- 
mayed recipient of a communication informing him 
that he was aware that the company intended to 
form a settlement in New Zealand, which informa- 
tion his Lordship declared to be great news to him. 
It further stated that the first ship was actually to 
sail upon 1st May, and requested letters commend- 
atory to the Governors of New South Wales and 
Van Diemen's Land. This application, as was 
probably intended, forced Lord Normanby's hand, 
and compelled him to almost pledge the Government 
to obtain territorial rights over New Zealand by 
negotiation with the natives ; while declaring that 
meanwhile the Company could not be recognised, 
and that no guarantee could be given for the validity 
of its land purchases. The good ship Tory^ of 400 
tons, armed with eight guns and with thirty-five souls 
aboard, none the less sailed from London on the 5th 
May, the anniversary of the memorable day that ushered 
in the French Revolution, and of the death of 
Napoleon. She carried among other passengers 
Colonel William Wakefield, agent of the Company, 
late of Lancaster Castle, but more recently still of 
the Portuguese and Spanish services, where he had 
won honour as a brave and able soldier ; Wakefield's 



154- BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

son, Edward Jerningham, who had in the preceding 
year accompanied his father to Canada, a youth 
of more ability than conduct, notwithstanding the 
steadying influences of Bruce Castle School and King's 
College ; DiefFenbach, afterwards famous as a natu- 
ralist ; and that poor bedizened daw, ' Prince ' Nayti. 
The commander, Edmund Chaffers, had been master 
of the Beagle in the memorable six years' voyage 
through which Fitzroy carried Darwin. The ex- 
pedition was merely a precursor of the despatch of 
the general body of emigrants, which was to follow 
in time to effect a junction with it at Port Hardy, 
in Cook's Straits, by ioth January 1840, the height 
of the New Zealand summer. 

The Tory sailed from London, as has been seen, 
four days after the appointed time, a delay doubtless 
inevitable, for the Company's directors and the power 
behind them ■ must have well known that no time 
was to be lost. She cast anchor at Plymouth, and as 
she did so a stout, fresh-complexioned, middle-aged 
gentleman, with a countenance expressive of intelli- 
gence and resolution, 2 left London in a post-chaise, 
driving rapidly to the south-west. This was no other 
than Edward Gibbon Wakefield, whom rumours had 
reached that Government intended to stop the de- 
parture of the vessel. He urged the Tory off, and she 

1 Wakefield did not become a director till some time afterwards. 

2 ' A countenance expressing in turn a sort of playful cunning, warm 
sensibility, clear insight and firm, resolute purpose.' — Thornton Hunt. 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 155 

sailed unmolested on 12th May. Whether Govern- 
ment could have worked itself up to an act of such 
courageous cowardice cannot be known. If it had, 
what a theme for epigram at the expense of a country 
that stopped the Tory and did not stop the Alabama ! 
In any case, Wakefield's vigorous action was the fitting 
crown of a series of vigorous actions which won for our 
Queen as bright a jewel as any of her diadem, and saved 
the Britain of the South from becoming a French 
convict settlement, a nuisance hateful to Gcd and 
man, only to be abated at the cost of a bloody 
war. 

While the Tory was ploughing the waves, the 
Company was not idle on shore. Their prospectus 
had already appeared on 2d May. On 14th May 
they held a meeting, the agenda for which, extant 
on a sheet of paper in Wakefield's writing, afford the 
liveliest picture of the Hero as Company Promoter. 
The most important of the nine items also convey 
the Company's apology for its energetic action : — 

'To suggest, in general terms, the expediency of 
vigorous action as the best means of inducing Parlia- 
ment to legalise and regulate the colonisation of New 
Zealand ; showing that nothing will be done by 
Government unless individuals act, and how nearly all 
the colonies of England originated in the activity of 
individuals ; explaining the necessary preoccupation 
and indifference of Government, and the necessity 
for legislation which arises when numbers emigrate 



156 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

directly from England to establish themselves in a 
distant country. 

C A despatch from the Governor to the Colonial 
Secretary explanatory of the state of the question, 
pointing out the reasons for legislating, suggesting the 
best mode of proceeding for national purposes, and 
asking for an interview for the directors.' 

Lord Durham accordingly wrote on 22d May 
soliciting an interview with Lord Normanby. De- 
putations were received on 1st June and 13th June ; yet 
Lord Normanby thought himself justified in stating 
on 1 2th August that he had c no knowledge of the pro- 
ceedings of the New Zealand Company.' They had in 
fact stirred him up to announce by a letter to the 
Treasury on 13th June his intention c of adding certain 
parts of the islands of New Zealand to the Colony of 
New South Wales as a dependency of that Govern- 
ment,' and of exalting Captain Hobson, R.N., the 
new British consul, known for gallantry in the West 
Indies, and as the layer-out of Melbourne, to the dignity 
of Lieutenant-Governor. Circumlocutionary corre- 
spondence between the Treasury, Colonial Office and 
Foreign Office delayed Hobson's appointment until 
14th August, two days before the Tory, which had 
enjoyed a splendid run without sight of land save a 
distant part of the Canaries, c saw the high land of 
New Zealand.' She anchored at Port Nicholson, on 
the northern side of Cook's Strait, on 20th September. 
Hobson left England shortly afterwards, and arrived in 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 157 

the Bay of Islands on 29th January 1840. The instruc- 
tions given to the leaders of the rival expeditions, and 
the proceedings of each, will be best related in a subse- 
quent chapter. The narrative will be a joyful history 
in so far as it records that the one absolutely indispens- 
able object was accomplished by New Zealand being 
preserved to the nation and becoming the home of 
prosperous colonists ; a lamentable one in so far as it 
recites the disfigurement of what might have been an 
ideal chapter in colonization. The fault lay entirely 
with the Government, an excellent administration in 
many respects, but neither sufficiently large-hearted to 
meet the Association in a generous and confiding 
spirit, nor (which would have been equally indispens- 
able) sufficiently resolute to subject its doings to the 
control of a strong but sympathetic representative of 
the Crown. It let things drift until they could drift 
no longer, and then in a panic created an authority 
antagonistic to the original colonists, the source of 
endless dissension, scandal and damage, material and 
moral. Abler men succeeded Lords Glenelg and 
Norman by at the Colonial Office, but they could 
never get out of the groove traced for them when 
their predecessors compelled the high-principled and 
disinterested directorate of the New Zealand Associa- 
tion to descend to the level of a joint-stock company. 



CHAPTER VI 

wakefield in canada with lord durham in 

1838 recall of the mission the durham 

report — Wakefield's subsequent visits to 

CANADA. 

Chronology, or once at variance with her sister 
History, bids us interrupt the narrative of New 
Zealand colonization and turn to that remarkable 
episode in Wakefield's life, his mission to Canada 
in 1838 as, together with Charles Buller, the 
confidential adviser of Lord Durham. It is an episode 
brilliant indeed as regards its momentous con- 
sequences to the Empire, but obscure as concerns 
Wakefield's personal share in it. To the public 
eye the mission for a while appeared a failure ; and 
yet a real victory was won — the victory of a few 
ideas which arose silently in the minds of at most 
three persons, and shaped a State paper which shaped 
the destinies of the British Colonial Empire. The 
actual authorship of the Durham Report may perhaps 
in some degree admit of elucidation, but the origina- 
tion of the ideas which gave it birth can never be 
accurately determined. Durham, Charles Buller, 
Wakefield had in common the attribute of magna- 

158 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 159 

nimity. None of them ever sought to deprive a 
colleague of a particle of merited honour. As, 
however, Wakefield's ostensible share in the transac- 
tions of Durham's Canadian mission was of necessity- 
much less conspicuous than Durham's or Buller's, 
it is but redressing the balance to point out that 
he avowedly stood in the position of instructor to 
the other two, who in colonial affairs were proud to 
be accounted his disciples. This needs to be borne in 
mind, for the indications of his direct agency are of 
the slightest. It is also to be remembered that 
whatever may have been his share in inspiring that 
Magna Charta of the colonies, the Durham Report, 
this was not the work that he was sent out to 
accomplish ; he was rather expected to apply the 
Wakefield system to the Crown lands. In truth, the 
scope of the Durham mission became greatly enlarged, 
and while it for a while seemed a failure as concerned 
the minor objects which it was despatched to effect, 
it was preparing the greatest of successes in a higher 
sphere. Durham, Buller, Wakefield might all be 
compared to Saul, the son of Kish ; hunting the 
strayed asses of Canadian disaffection, they found the 
kingdom of Responsible Government. 

It will be necessary to preface the story of Lord 
Durham's mission and its results with a brief account 
of the occurrences which had rendered it indispensable. 

The difficulties which Lord Durham was sent out 
to settle were of ancient date, and might be traced 



160 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

back to an avowedly healing measure. This was 
the re-enactment in 1774 of the French civil law, 
which the British conquest in 1763 had temporarily 
annulled. The Act — though drafted with such care- 
lessness as to have for a while deprived French 
Canadians of habeas corpus and trial by jury — produced 
on the whole a good effect, and served to maintain 
order during the American revolutionary war. Among 
its consequences, which may or may not have been 
intended, was the diversion of the stream of British 
immigration from Lower to Upper Canada, thus 
perpetuating the French type which Lower Canada 
retains to this day. In 1791 the colony was divided 
into two provinces, and a separate legislature estab- 
lished in each. The Lower Canadian House of 
Assembly being in consequence almost entirely 
French, it was sought to balance this by a 
nominated legislative council almost entirely English. 
Difficulties naturally arose, and the claims of the 
Lower House to the right of prescribing the appro- 
priation of the revenue led to continual disagreements. 
In 1828 the most serious grievances of the Canadians 
were removed, but only with the effect of showing 
that a spirit of revolt had taken possession of them, 
and that the redress of wrongs, originally a bona fide 
object of agitation, had become the mere stalking 
horse of revolution. This attitude compelled the 
Commons to reject the not unreasonable demand for 
an elective legislative council, preferred in 1837, 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 161 

which, so long as the two provinces remained dis- 
united, could only have prefaced further agitation. 
Yet the French Canadians certainly did not wish 
to be absorbed into the United States, and they 
can hardly have fancied themselves able to stand 
alone. 1 The object of the discontented Anglo- 
Canadians in the Upper Province, who had sufficient 
reason to complain of the l family compact,' or rather 
ring of politicians which, omnipotent in the Legis- 
lative Council, engrossed every place of trust and 
profit, was, on the other hand, annexation to the 
United States. From October 1832, the Assembly 
of Lower Canada stopped the payment of the salaries 
of the civil servants. In October 1837, insurrection 
broke out in Lower Canada ; and in December in 
Upper Canada. Both were easily repressed, in great 
measure by the assistance of loyal volunteers. A 
more alarming symptom was the assemblage on 
the United States frontier of bands of American 
sympathisers, who in some instances actually invaded 
the colony, although they were soon expelled. The 
Home Government, rightly considering that the 
situation demanded vigorous measures, suspended the 
Canadian constitution, and announced their intention 
of sending Lord Durham out as Governor-General 
of the five British provinces, and also as Lord High 

1 I have put the question, * What did the " habitans " want ? ' to a 
hundred people, French and English, and never could obtain a satisfactory 
answer. They all said, ' No one knows ; it was neither more nor less 
than madness.' — Godley, Letters from America, vol. i, p. 78. 

L 



i6z BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

Commissioner, clothed with extraordinary powers for 
the settlement of questions pending in the Canadas. 

The reason which led the Government to select 
Lord Durham for what O'Connell might have 
called the c Head-Pacificatorship ' of the Canadas was 
correctly stated by the Quarterly Review. 'They 
did not know what else to do with him.' It was 
equally dangerous to take him into the Cabinet, or 
to leave him out. Within, he would have been 
an imperious and uncomfortable colleague ; without, 
he was very likely to put himself at the head of the 
more advanced section of the Liberal party, which, 
though entirely unable to form a government, was 
quite capable of upsetting one. Ministers, therefore, 
justly reasoned that, from a party point of view, 
nothing but good could come of Lord Durham's 
appointment to Canada. If he succeeded, the credit 
would largely redound to the Government, and the 
thorough settlement of the contingent problems 
would be a matter of sufficient magnitude to detain 
him abroad for several years. If he failed, he would 
return discredited and harmless. Canada was simply 
a tub thrown to a whale. 

It may well be doubted whether, with the excep- 
tion of Lord John Russell, any of the Ministers 
thought Lord Durham the fittest man to be entrusted 
with the government of Canada at such a crisis. And 
yet, granted one essential condition, he really was so. 
He had the stainless character, the high spirit, the 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 163 

courage, the disinterestedness, the patriotism, the 
imperial instinct, the industry necessary for a great 
Governor-General. His defects were incapacity for 
the management of men, and inexperience in adminis- 
trative business. His haughtiness and sensitiveness 
disqualified him for the arts which the most high- 
minded politicians find indispensable in self-governed 
communities, and the delicacy of his health had 
hitherto debarred him from laborious office. These 
were defects which able counsellors might do much 
to remedy. Good advice was the one thing needful, 
and the general success of Durham's measures proves 
that he knew where to find and how to receive it. 
The one error in administration he committed was, 
as we shall see, in nowise discreditable to him, but 
arose from a generous confidence that the public 
good would for once be allowed to prevail over legal 
technicalities. 

The men in whom Durham's confidence was 
chiefly reposed were Charles Buller and Edward 
Gibbon Wakefield. To the appointment of Buller 
as his chief secretary no objection could possibly be 
made ; his character was rated even more highly 
than his ability. The son of an Indian judge, he 
had in his youth enjoyed the instructions of a very 
exceptional tutor, Thomas Carlyle ; and, as a brilliant 
young Cantab, had qualified for a legislator by be- 
coming an 'Apostle.' Elected to Parliament at an 
early age, he had distinguished himself by the 



164 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

liberality of his sentiments, the effectiveness of his 
oratory, and the geniality of his humour. He had 
already rendered a great public service as chairman 
of the Public Record Commission. He had studied 
colonial questions under Wakefield's guidance, and 
the strength and durability of the attachment with 
which the latter inspired him are among the soundest 
guarantees of his own worth. 

Wakefield, of course, was far from standing in the 
same position ; it had not yet been thought expedient 
that his name should appear on the board of the 
New Zealand Company ; and Durham must have 
been well aware that his employment in any capacity 
would expose the Canadian administration to damaging 
attacks. The advantage, nevertheless, outweighed the 
objection, and Durham courageously acted as he 
deemed right in the public interest. Wakefield 
remained intimately associated with him throughout 
his mission, and we have Durham's own word that 
he would have been appointed Commissioner of 
Crown Lands but for the interposition of the alarmed 
Ministers at home. No such vindication can be 
offered for another appointment which created more 
scandal than could have been occasioned by the 
bestowal of any office upon Wakefield, and could 
not be justified on the ground of the indispensable- 
ness of the recipient. Mr (afterwards Sir) Thomas 
Turton, under-secretary and legal adviser, appears 
to have been an able lawyer, but possessed no such 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 165 

monopoly of legal knowledge as could render it 
necessary to search the bar of England for the one 
barrister who had been divorced by the House of 
Lords on the ground of incestuous adultery. The 
causes of this unfortunate step will be most fitly 
investigated by Lord Durham's biographer. Two 
have been assigned — one the chivalrous but (in a 
public matter) reprehensible generosity which led 
Durham, having once rashly named Turton, to 
stand by an unfortunate friend and former school- 
fellow ; the other, a blunder of the Treasury's 
which led him to think that the nomination could 
not be retracted. As so often happens, the defensible 
appointment was prevented, and the indefensible 
retained. 

Durham should have been doubly cautious, for 
he knew that he was leaving in his rear a bitter, 
unscrupulous and most formidable enemy. Lord 
Brougham had never forgiven his brilliant oratorical 
campaign in the autumn of 1834, when in speech 
after speech he castigated the erratic Chancellor 
veering to the Tories. Brougham now had his absent 
adversary at a terrible disadvantage, and no consider- 
ation of candour or patriotism could mitigate his 
virulence. His animosity towards the Ministry who 
had ostracised him was even more intense than his 
animosity towards Durham, and he revelled in his 
ability, now to wound them through Durham's side, 
now to salve their hurts with the gall of his con- 



1 66 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

temptuous patronage. The attitude of this distin- 
guished personage towards the Melbourne Ministry 
for several years was precisely that of a cat to a 
mouse. Seldom indeed can it have happened that 
a public man neither trusted nor respected by anybody, 
without a single avowed follower in the country, 
should make so conspicuous a figure before the world, 
and exercise such real influence upon the course of 
affairs. The secret was the nice balance of the con- 
tending political parties. The moment that a strong 
Government appeared which neither feared nor needed 
him, Brougham sank into insignificance. 

The Government bill for suspending the Canadian 
constitution and granting extraordinary powers to a 
Lord High Commissioner was introduced into the 
Commons on 16th January, and passed the Lords on 
6th February, after having been ' greatly mauled and 
worried ' by Sir Robert Peel in the Lower House, and 
by Lord Brougham in the Upper. The Duke of 
Wellington might easily have thrown it out, but, as 
ever with him, patriotism prevailed over party spirit. 
During the debate in the Commons, the note of 
responsible government for the colony, the ultimate 
solution of the problem, was sounded by Mr 
Warburton, but mainly on the ground that such a 
concession must produce absolute separation, the con- 
summation desired by the speaker. The act provided 
for the suspension of the constitution of Lower 
Canada until November 1840, and for the interim 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 167 

appointment of a special legislative council by the 
Governor under the authority of the Crown. The 
Governor's powers were imperfectly defined, and it 
was to be foreseen that any attempt on his part to 
exercise them vigorously would lead to attacks from 
the Opposition which a feeble Government, dependent 
upon an exiguous Irish and Scotch majority, was not 
likely to resist. 

Durham, however, nothing daunted, sailed on 24th 
April, and arrived at Quebec on 29th May, accom- 
panied by Buller and other members of his suite. 
Wakefield appears to have arrived somewhat later. 
Lord Glenelg, the Colonial Secretary, had believed 
that he was already on his way to Canada by 4th 
May. The statement is made in a private letter 
from Glenelg to Durham, requesting that Wakefield 
' may have no regular appointment under the Crown. 
You may well believe that it is not with any wish to 
injure Mr Wakefield that we make this request. He 
is a clever man, and may, I have no doubt, be very 
usefully employed, and of course there could be no 
objection to his employment unofficially. We cannot 
help feeling, however, that to give him an official 
station in the province might produce much dissatis- 
faction and embarrassment.' This would not seem to 
have been apprehended from any question as to private 
character, but from the antipathy of the French 
Canadians to Wakefield's views on colonization, as 
afterwards expressed by Roebuck in a letter to the 



168 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

Spectator. c One of the chief disputes between the 
Executive and the House of Assembly had risen 
respecting the management of the waste lands of the 
country, and the application of the funds derived from 
them. Respecting this matter, Mr Wakefield had 
made himself exceedingly busy in England — had 
proposed a new theory and proposed to withdraw the 
lands from the surveillance of the people of the 
colonies altogether, and to convert the funds into the 
means of deporting the pauper population of England 
and Ireland.' Roebuck adds that Wakefield was 
employed in making a report upon the waste lands 
of the colony, no doubt the basis of the elaborate 
paper on the same subject by Charles Buller in 
Appendix B to the Durham Report. Glenelg's 
remonstrances with Durham on Wakefield's antici- 
pated appointment were reinforced by a letter which, 
a few days after Durham's arrival in Canada, he 
received from Lord Melbourne, referring, as would 
appear, to Turton's appointment also. To this, as 
regarded Wakefield, he replied as follows * : — 

* June 15, 1838. — As for Mr Wakefield, your letter 
arrived before him, and I have therefore been able, 
without compromising my own character and inde- 
pendence, to comply with your desire. He holds 
no employment or official situation whatever, nor 



1 We are obliged to Mr Stuart J. Reid for the communication of 
Lord Glenelg's letter, and of Durham's replies to him and Melbourne. 
Melbourne's own letter seems not to be forthcoming. 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 169 

will his name appear before the public at all. c< Oh, 
no ! we never mention him ; his name is never 
heard." Really, if it were not very inconvenient, 
all this would be very ludicrous. But I am placed 
in a very painful situation. I am called to perform 
an almost superhuman task. You provide me with 
no, or most inadequate, means from yourselves, and 
you then interfere with the arrangements I make to 
supply myself with the best talent I can find.' 

On the same day Durham thus replied to Lord 
Glenelg : — 

' I had intended to have named Mr Wakefield a 
Commissioner of Inquiry into the Crown Lands, 
Emigration, etc., but in consequence of your letter 
have given up all thought of it, and Mr Wakefield 
will hold no official situation of any kind under me 
or the Government/ 

Wakefield, nevertheless, remained in Canada, and 
continued to render efficient service during the entire 
period of Lord Durham's mission. The ostensible 
Chief Commissioner of Crown Lands, Charles Buller, 
was discharging the more onerous duties of Chief 
Secretary, and was, moreover, Wakefield's alter ego 
in matters of land and emigration. If, however, 
Wakefield received any remuneration, it must have 
come out of Durham's own pocket. 

Durham's first act had been to dismiss the Execu- 
tive Council he found, and to instal one chiefly com- 
posed of his own immediate followers, a step fully 



170 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

justifiable on the ground assigned, that, under the 
existing exceptional circumstances, c the administra- 
tion of affairs should be completely independent of 
and unassociated with all parties and persons in the 
province.' Wakefield, of course, was not a member 
of this council, nor had it been intended that he 
should be ; but he was undoubtedly consulted on 
all important occasions. Within a few weeks of 
his arrival, Durham had initiated several important 
and healing reforms, three of which, a land commis- 
sion, a registry of titles, and the commutation of feudal 
tenures, lay within Wakefield's especial sphere. 

There is a book in New Zealand given to Wake- 
field by Lord Durham, with an inscription testifying 
that he had never erred except when he rejected 
Wakefield's advice. If, then, Durham considered 
his famous Ordinance of 28th June an error, it was 
promulgated in opposition to the advice of Wake- 
field, but it is quite probable that neither regarded 
it in that light. In one point of view, the Ordinance 
ruined Durham's mission by providing his antagonists 
at home with a point of attack, and cowing his feeble 
friends. From the standpoint of reason it was wise 
and right. The question at issue bore no relation to 
the high matters of policy which Durham had been 
sent to Canada to determine. It simply regarded 
the fate of the captured rebels whom he found await- 
ing trial. Their offence was notorious, but was virtue 
in the eyes of the majority of their countrymen. An 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 171 

ordinary French Canadian jury would have acquitted 
them forthwith ; to obtain justice, recourse must have 
been had to the odious method of a packed tribunal. 
The prisoners themselves had fully expected this course 
to be resorted to, and were unspeakably relieved to 
find that Lord Durham proposed to send them out 
of the country without trial. They gladly accepted 
what they rightly considered an act of signal clem- 
ency, and, if only the British Parliament had not 
been sitting, all would have been well. But the 
legality of Durham's Ordinance banishing the prisoners 
— though much might be said on its behalf even on 
that ground — was not altogether so clear as its ex- 
pediency, and one detail was obviously ultra vires — 
their exile to Bermuda, where Durham had no juris- 
diction to send them, and the Governor none to 
detain them. A strong Government would have 
immediately cured the irregularity by a short Act 
of Parliament, and even a weak Government might 
have seen that it was better to resign on such a 
question than to allow its course to be dictated by 
its enemies. Not so Lord Melbourne's administra- 
tion, which, disallowing Durham's Ordinance, was 
compelled to pass an indemnity bill, forced upon it 
with every circumstance of humiliation by Lord 
Brougham, who, as was said at the time, c deter- 
mined on involving in one common misfortune and 
disgrace the Ministers and their Governor-General, 
not only accomplished the fall of Lord Durham, but 



172 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

so contrived that all the odium of the transaction 
should attach to the Ministers themselves.' On 
9th August, Melbourne announced the disallowance 
of the Ordinance. Durham's first intimation of it 
was from the columns of an American newspaper. 
Buller saw from the expression of his face that he 
had received a violent shock. The official despatches 
arrived a few days later, and on 25th September he 
sent in his resignation. On 9th October he issued 
a proclamation, certainly ill-judged, which gave the 
Government an excuse for summoning him home. 
He escaped this mortification by having already left 
the colony without having been recalled, or having 
obtained the Royal consent, an act undoubtedly liable 
to grave criticism, and of which more would have 
been heard if the despatch dispensing with his ser- 
vices had not already been upon its way. He quitted 
Quebec on 1st November, and two days later an in- 
surrection exploded, which was suppressed without 
difficulty by his provisional successor, General Col- 
borne. The despatch announcing his immediate 
return was brought to England by his aide-de-camp, 
Captain Dillon, who, accompanied by Wakefield, 
sailed from New York on 25th October. Rough 
weather compelled them to transfer themselves to 
a fishing boat ofF the coast of Ireland, and they 
experienced some peril in getting to land. 

Durham's return interrupted several important 
measures in the preparation of which it found him 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 173 

engaged, which, as they were doubtless agreeable to 
the recommendations of his Report, must have given 
him a high place among colonial legislators. Apart 
from these and the memorable Report itself, the chief 
fruit of his meteoric administration was the evidence 
it yielded that an English Governor could be popular 
in Canada. He went on steadily rising in popularity 
throughout the whole of his rule, and enjoyed the full 
sympathy of public opinion in his conflict with the 
Ministry at home. Three thousand of the most 
respectable inhabitants of Quebec attended him to 
the place of embarkation, and his popularity in Upper 
Canada was even greater. It must be a question how 
far he had gone out to the country with any definite 
views respecting the French Canadian grievances. 
Wakefield, in a remarkable letter to the Spectator, 
published on 24th November in reply to letters from 
Roebuck, the salaried agent of the French Canadians, 
says that he for his own part had been a strong 
Canadian sympathiser, but, as a result of an extensive 
acquaintance with the leading men among them, had 
been led to change his views. This is important, as 
it leads to the recommendation for the union of the 
British North America provinces as a means of con- 
trolling the French element by the English, which is 
one of the most important features of the Durham 
Report. A journey to Saratoga, undertaken without 
Lord Durham's knowledge, in the vain hope of meet- 
ing the exiled Canadian leader, Papineau, and men- 



174 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

tioned in this letter, is the only vestige of Wakefield's 
political activity during Durham's mission. Thomas 
Slingsby Duncombe, who kept a diary of his visit to 
Lord Durham, mentions him repeatedly, but only as 
an amateur in mesmerism. 1 

Durham arrived off Plymouth on 26th November 
after a tempestuous passage, and it was four days more 
ere the weather moderated sufficiently to allow his 
landing. The reception he encountered was more in 
accordance with Wakefield's original expectations than 
with his subsequent conclusions, if Greville is warranted 
in attributing to him the admission upon his own 
arrival c that he had never been so amazed in the 
course of his life, and owned that they had all ex- 
pected to make a very different impression, and to be 
hailed with great applause.' Durham was hailed with 
great applause, yet it is incontestable that the bad 
taste of his proclamation making known the disallow- 
ance of his Ordinance had created very unfavourable 
comment, and that the public feeling at one time is 
accurately expressed by a celebrated passage in Mill's 
Autobiography : c Lord Durham was bitterly attacked 
on all sides — inveighed against by enemies, given up 



1 Wakefield was a powerful magnetiser. ' I recollect,' says Mr 
Allom, ( a story he told me of his being at an evening party where he 
had mesmerised a young lady, but was struck with horror on finding that 
he could not revive her. He jumped into a cab and went in search of his 
friend Dr Elliotson. After some hours' search Elliotson was found, and 
they returned in company, and Dr Elliotson succeeded in reviving the 
lady.' 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 175 

by timid friends, while those who would willingly 
have defended him did not know what to say. He 
appeared to be returning a defeated and discredited 
man. I had followed the Canadian events from the 
beginning ; I had been one of the prompters of his 
prompters ; his policy was almost exactly what mine 
would have been, and I was in a position to defend it. 
I wrote and published a manifesto in the [London and 
Westminster] Review, in which I took the very highest 
ground in his behalf, claiming for him not mere 
acquittal, but praise and honour. Instantly a number 
of other writers took up the tone. I believe there 
was a portion of truth in what Lord Durham soon 
after, with polite exaggeration, said to me — that to 
this article might be ascribed the almost triumphal 
reception which he met with on his arrival in 
England.' The Spectator of 24th November made 
copious extracts from advance sheets of this article, 
which other journals had also received ; there was, 
therefore, time to influence public opinion. Mill's 
generous temper lent fire to his generally measured 
and sober advocacy, and his essay was admirably 
calculated to effect its object. A powerful defence 
of Lord Durham on every point on which his conduct 
had been impugned was thus summed up : — 

' He has been thwarted, but he has not failed. He 
has shown how Canada ought to be governed ; and if 
anything can allay her dissensions, and again attach 
her to the mother country, this will. He has at the 



176 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

critical moment taken the initiative of a healing policy. 
He has disposed of the great immediate embarrassment 
— the political offenders. He has shown to the well 
intentioned of both sides an honourable basis on which 
they may accommodate their differences. He has 
detached from the unreasonable of one party their 
chief support — the sympathy of the United States, 
and it is reserved for him to detach from the un- 
reasonable of the other the sympathy of the people 
of England. He comes home master of the details 
of those abuses which he has recognised as the original 
causes of the disaffection ; prepared to expose these as 
they have never before been exposed, and to submit 
to Parliament, after the most comprehensive inquiry 
which has ever taken place, the system on which 
the North American colonies may be preserved and 
well governed hereafter.' 

This promise and vow of his political sponsor 
Durham amply redeemed by his famous Report of 
the following year, which has become the accepted 
exposition of the principles which should guide the 
mother country in her dealings with her colonies. 
The effect of the document was enhanced by the 
sensational method of its publication. While Ministers 
were still hesitating what to do with it, the most 
important portion appeared (8th February) in the 
Times. With the same decision which he afterwards 
showed in anticipating the probable resolution of 
Ministers to stop the pioneer vessel of the New 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 177 

Zealand Company, Wakefield precipitated the Report 
into print to save it from mutilation. According 
to the testimony of Sir Richard Hanson, after- 
wards Chief- Justice of South Australia, then one of 
Durham's secretaries, adduced by Henry Reeve in 
his edition of the Greville Memoirs, his motive was 
jealousy for the integrity of the portion which he 
had himself written, respecting which Durham seemed 
inclined to make concessions. In this case he must 
have acted without Durham's sanction, and this 
agrees best with Durham's language in the House 
of Lords. According to a tradition in the Wake- 
field family, however, the sanction was given, and 
when Durham seemed disposed to recall it he was 
answered, 'My lord, it has gone already.' In any 
case, there can be no question that Wakefield 
rendered a great service to the country. The 
Report must eventually have crept into light as 
originally written, for two thousand copies had been 
privately printed, but it must have lost much of its 
effect if it had been mutilated or delayed. Hanson 
took it to the T'unes. The best justification for the 
step will be found in the words of Lord Melbourne : 
c He did not think the noble earl had any right to 
conclude that his Report in full would be laid before 
Parliament, but Government had now no discretion 
in the case.' 

The current belief respecting the authorship of the 
Durham Report was thus epigrammatically expressed 

M 



178 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

at the time : c Wakefield thought it, Buller wrote it, 
Durham signed it.' 'Written,' says Stuart Mill, 'by- 
Charles Buller, partly under the inspiration of Wake- 
field.' According to Sir R. Hanson's account as com- 
municated to Henry Reeve, Buller wrote the whole 
except two * paragraphs ' on Church and Crown Lands. 
But this certainly much underrates Lord Durham's 
share. Mr Egerton, in his history of British Colonial 
Policy, justly remarks that the style is unlike that of 
the elaborate Report on Crown Lands in the appendix, 
to which Buller's name is attached. It may be added 
that a large part of it strongly resembles the style of 
the proclamation ot October announcing the dis- 
allowance of the Ordinance, which bears throughout 
the impress of strong personal feeling, and which it is 
scarcely probable that the high-spirited Durham would 
have delegated to a subordinate. This remark is especi- 
ally applicable to the most important portions of the 
Report — the preamble, the section on Lower Canada, 
and the general summing up and statement of remedies 
proposed. These wear a character of patrician dignity 
and hauteur not easily assumed save by one to the 
manner born. The evidence for Buller's share in the 
authorship is nevertheless too strong to be set aside. 1 
Miss Martineau, the last person to detract a leaf from 
Durham's chaplet, says of Charles Buller : ' It is under- 

1 The Quarterly Review seems to have been of opinion that the 
Report wrote itself. * We suspect, and shall be glad if our suspicion be 
confirmed, that in Lord Durham's execrable Report Mr Buller had as 
little hand as Lord Durham himself.' 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 179 

stood that the merit of the celebrated Report is mainly 
ascribable to him.' Perhaps the most probable view is 
that portions were rewritten by Durham from Buller's 
original draft, which would involve the retention of 
much of his wording. The section on Upper Canada 
may be entirely his. The recommendation for the 
union of the provinces almost certainly emanated from 
Wakefield — ' the person who puts in the jewel into Lord 
Durham's Report,' says a spiteful opponent. If he 
wrote any part of the Report on Church and Crown 
Lands, he wrote the whole; and the probability is 
that by < paragraphs,' if he really used the word, Sir R. 
Hanson meant c sections.' However these points may 
be determined, an equal share of the credit of the 
Report belongs to all concerned. It may well be that 
Durham was guided by his advisers to truths which he 
would not have discovered without them, but discern- 
ment in the choice of counsellors is one of the surest 
marks of ability in a ruler, and it is manifest that all 
the recommendations which he sanctioned had been 
intelligently considered and approved by him. 

The great value of Lord Durham's Report was that 
the principles justly recommended as effective for the 
pacification of Canada were such as, once accepted 
there, must be admitted as applicable to the colonies 
of the entire Empire, those only excepted which 
might be peopled by inferior races. In a masterly 
survey of the existing condition of affairs, Durham 
makes the same admission as we have seen Wakefield 



180 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

make in his letter to the Spectator — that he had been 
mistaken as to the causes of French Canadian discon- 
tent. The ostensible grounds of complaint were 
just, but the redress of these would have done little to 
appease the quarrel, which really sprang from hatred 
of the English nationality, and fear of being absorbed 
by it. ' I expected to find a contest between a 
government and a people — I found two nations 
warring in the bosom of a single state. I found a 
struggle, not of principles but of races ; and I per- 
ceived that it would be idle to attempt any ameliora- 
tion of laws or institutions until we could first 
succeed in terminating the deadly animosity that now 
separates the inhabitants of Lower Canada into the 
hostile divisions of French and English.' The 
remedy proposed was to give the French Canadians 
Responsible Government 1 — not the mere mockery 
they already possessed, which left their elected repre- 
sentatives without influence, but the same effective 
control over the Ministry of Canada as the British 
Parliament exercised over the Ministry of Britain. 
As a counterweight, all the five British American 
provinces were to be united ; disloyal and factious 
tendencies among the French were to be checked by 
a majority to the legislature attached to the British 
connection, and the two races, thus acting together, 

1 The subject was further developed in Responsible Government for 
the Colonies, 1840, an able pamphlet mainly written by Charles Buller, 
though Wakefield appears to have had a hand in it. 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 1S1 

were to learn their real community of country and 
of interest. c I admit,' writes Durham, c that the 
system which I propose would, in fact, place the 
internal government of the colony in the hands of 
the colonists themselves ; and that we should thus 
leave to them the execution of the laws of which we 
have long entrusted the making solely to them.' 

That this statement, now a commonplace, should 
then have been thought alarming, indicates most forcibly 
the progress of political enlightenment since that day, 
and the extent of the national obligations to Dur- 
ham and his coadjutors. The prevalent theory of the 
day — inconsistent with contentment or good govern- 
ment in Canada or any colony out of its infancy — 
was fairly enough indicated by the Quarterly Review 
in an article whose waspishness and italics bespeak 
the pen of Croker : ' The fundamental error is this, 
they forget that Canada is a province — a colony. They 
measure it by a scale of doctrines which are applicable 
only to a national and independent sovereignty.'* The 
idea in the writer's mind manifestly is that a colonist 
is from the nature of the case inferior to a citizen 
of the mother country : that a colony may have a 
legislative assembly to play with, but must not have 
a responsible ministry to work with. Responsible 
government, aye or no, that was the question. The 
Quarterly Reviewer had no doubt as to the moment- 
ous character of the decision about to be taken. 
'If this rank and infectious Report does not receive 



182 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

the high, marked and energetic discountenance and 
indignation of the Imperial Crown and Parliament, 
British America is lost.' A magnificent contribution 
to the literature of unfulfilled prophecy ! which never- 
theless represented the views of the bulk of the 
Tory party, though probably not those of its most 
intelligent leaders. To the restraining influence of 
Peel and Wellington, and to Lord John RusselPs 
advocacy of Durham's views in the Cabinet, must 
be ascribed the absence of any great party contest 
on the subject in the session of 1839. A mighty 
catastrophe had been expected. Durham, another 
Samson, was to have buried himself in the ruins of 
the Ministry, but the session left them both erect. 
The doctrines of the Report, meanwhile, were 
gradually filtering into men's minds, and Parliament 
had scarcely risen ere Lord John Russell's instructions 
to the new Governor, Poulett Thomson, afterwards 
Lord Sydenham, made tentative approaches to the 
principles of responsible government. Durham and 
his advisers had outrun their age by thirty years in 
proposing the union of all the North American 
colonies, but the union of Upper and Lower Canada 
(now Ontario and Quebec) was achieved in 1840 
by the adroitness of Poulett Thomson, who had 
departed primed for his task by numerous interviews 
with Durham. Lower Canada was not then in the 
enjoyment of representative institutions, and Upper 
Canada was wisely being allowed more representatives 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 183 

than its share, a concession which would not have 
been necessary if Durham's plan of fusing all the 
North American colonies had been adhered to. 
Much friction remained to be overcome, but a 
succession of able and prudent Governors-General 
have so cemented the relations between the mother 
country and the colony that while the desire, whether 
for absolute independence or for absorption into the 
United States, has almost died out on the one side, 
the unworthy craving to abdicate our North 
American Empire is even nearer extinction on the 
other. The new constitution was signed by the 
Queen on 23d July 1840, five days before the 
death of Durham, almost whose last words were : 
'The Canadians will one day do justice to my 
memory.' He could not foresee how far beyond 
Canada would extend the influence of his Report, 
c the most valuable document in the English language 
on the subject of colonial policy' (Egerton) ; how it 
would mould the relations of the mother country 
with colonies yet uncreated ; and how the last days 
of his ablest counsellor would be devoted to battling 
for responsible government on the other side of the 
world. 

Wakefield twice returned to Canada, and for brief 
intervals actively participated in its politics. He was 
there from December 1841 to the winter of 1842, 
and again from September 1843 to January 1844. 
He says in the Art of Colonization that he had ex- 



184 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

pectations of obtaining a permanent position in the 
colony, but does not state what it would have been. 
His visits seem to have had some connection with 
the affairs of a land company, and also with canal 
and railway legislation, and it was probably with a 
view of furthering these projects that in November 
1842, 'having taken a very active part in promoting 
that change ' [the admission of the French Canadians 
to a share in the administration] ' under Sir Charles 
Bagot ' [Lord Sydenham's successor] 'I was elected a 
member of the Assembly by an important county 
of Lower Canada,' /.*., Beauharnois, through which 
the canal was to be run. The majority was 737, 
entirely made up of the votes of three French 
Canadian parishes. Colonial politicians are not 
always regardful of social amenities, and at the time 
of Wakefield's election his opponents made the freest 
use of the bygone unfortunate circumstances in his 
life. He read all the attacks, and tossed them one 
after the other across the room to his secretary, 
Charles Allom, afterwards an officer in the Indian 
army, with the remark, ' Send that to your mother.' 
During both visits he acted as correspondent to the 
Colonial Gazette^ and his letters will be found full 
of interest. In 1843 ne to0 ^ a conspicuous part in 
Canadian politics as a Member of Parliament, and 
one more important, though unacknowledged, as the 
secret adviser of Sir Charles Metcalfe, the Governor- 
General, In December 1843 he moved an amend- 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 185 

ment of portentous length, and supported it by a 
speech which Mr Dent, the diligent and judicious 
Canadian historian of this period, calls l argumentative 
and able.' From the summary he gives it would 
appear well entitled to this character, although of 
Wakefield's oratory he remarks : ' As a public speaker 
he appealed to the reason rather than to the imagina- 
tion, and there was little of the ad captandum orator 
about him. He was better calculated to impress 
educated men than the public at large, and by con- 
sequence was not well fitted for the labours of an 
electoral campaign, although he possessed many rare 
qualifications for a legislator.' It harmonises with this 
account that those who have heard Wakefield speak 
in public recollect his ' dallying with his golden chain,' 
like the chancellor in Tennyson's c Sleeping Beauty.' 
c Though not much accustomed to speaking in public,' 
says one who had heard him in New Zealand, * his 
language was powerful and impressive ; though never 
fluent, he was never tedious ; and when roused by 
passion he displayed latent powers which early cultiva- 
tion and exercise might have raised to those of a 
commanding orator.' 

The all-engrossing question during Wakefield's third 
visit to Canada was the conflict between Sir Charles 
Metcalfe, the Governor-General, and his Ministers, 
which for long after Wakefield's departure kept the 
country without a government. Wakefield sided 
with Sir Charles, in consequence, Mr Dent thinks, 



i86 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

of the hostility of Ministers to his plans of coloniza- 
tion. Mr Dent, however, who is the very model of 
a fair-minded historian, adds that he became one of 
Sir Charles's most trusted advisers ; and it would not 
be easy to produce a higher testimonial to character 
than the confidence of Sir Charles Metcalfe. The 
controversies of that day are now matters of history, 
but they retain a permanent importance for the 
biography of Wakefield as the parents of two of his 
most remarkable literary productions, one most 
creditable to his moral nature, the other to his 
intellectual. The author of the noble character of 
Sir Charles Metcalfe, c whom God made greater than 
the Colonial Office,' 1 was assuredly not insensible to 
the beauty of virtue, his pen is steeped in genuine 
veneration for ' the Christian gentleman, of whom it 
is not enough to say that nothing would persuade 
him to take an unfair advantage ; he can hardly per- 
suade himself to take a fair one : ' — the impersonation, 
the writer evidently feels, of a higher ideal than it is 
given to himself to attain. It is believed that the 
publication of this pamphlet prevented Sir Charles 
Metcalfe's recall. Far more important, however, is 
another production which perhaps has never been 
mentioned in a book from the day of its publication 

1 A Vkiv of Sir Charles Metcalfe's Government of Canada. By a 
Member of the Provincial Parliament. London, 1844. The author of 
a violent pamphlet against Wakefield, not willing that he should have 
the credit of a fine saying, altered 'God' in the above quotation into 
' Government ' ! 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 187 

to the present — an essay, nevertheless, of such wisdom, 
insight and vigour that the present writer would 
deem all the pains bestowed on this biography well 
bestowed if they had accomplished nothing else than 
its retrieval from oblivion. 

Fisher's Colonial Magazine for July 1844 contained 
forty-five octavo pages of excruciatingly small print, 
entitled ' Sir Charles Metcalfe in Canada/ and attributed 
in the general preface to c an eminent public character,' 
but Wakefield's authorship is patent in every line. 
About half of it is occupied with the ephemeral affairs 
of Sir Charles Metcalfe's administration, the rest is a 
magnificent essay on Responsible Government, attack- 
ing the fallacies which then prevailed as to the right 
of the mother country to keep her colonies in leading 
strings, expounding the principles of the British 
Constitution itself, and showing with what ease and 
safety they admit of application to the colonies. The 
special evils of the denial of representative institutions 
to colonies under the sway of a Governor and an 
official clique are vigorously exposed ; nominated 
councils and civil lists independent of popular control 
come in for their share of censure ; and the scheme 
of giving the colonies direct representation in the 
Imperial legislature is discussed and rejected. The 
superiority of the English system to republican de- 
mocracy is asserted, and the argument involves a most 
acute examination of the inevitable, and therefore 
incurable, defects of the constitution of the United 



1 88 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

States. Though there is no direct reference to 
Ireland, the impossibility of any system of Home Rule, 
short of an absolute legislative separation, is pointed 
out by anticipation. The soundest rules for perma- 
nently attaching the colonies to the mother country are 
laid down ; and towards the conclusion, the local affairs 
of Canada disposed of, the author's imperial instinct 
finds expression in a prevision of the probable future 
relations between Britain and her colonial empire : — 

* True it is, that the wide continents we are colon- 
ising promise at some distant day to maintain com- 
munities too powerful for the precise colonial relation, 
even as I have been describing it, to continue for ever 
to subsist between them and the people of these 
islands. But that period is distant, though inevitable. 
All we can certainly know is that it will come ; that 
at some future time our colonies, powerful as the 
parent state or more so, must either, through mis- 
management, have become independent states more 
likely to be its enemies than its hearty friends, or 
else through a wise foresight have been kept closely 
bound to it — confederacy in some shape by degrees 
taking the place of the old bond of union — the British 
nation continuing still united so far as perpetual peace, 
mutual -good understanding, freedom of commerce 
and identity of foreign policy can unite it — these 
islands still its metropolis, though their people be no 
longer the admitted holders of its whole imperial 
power. All we can do is to take care of the present 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 189 

and near future. The future that is far off will take 
good care of itself. For this age and the next it is 
enough to know that colonies, built up by our own 
people, and gifted with our own free institutions, 
must be bound alike by the natural feelings and the 
commercial wants of their people, to ourselves and 
our policy, no less than to our trade ; that neither 
the one tie nor the other need we, nor yet if we are 
wise shall we, ever let go or loosen.' 

In another remarkable passage Wakefield refutes 
by anticipation the groundless objection to his system, 
so frequently brought forward since his death, of its 
having been contrived in the interest of an oligarchic 
plutocracy, and designed to stereotype the social 
inequalities which prevailed in the parent country. 
He was, indeed, desirous that all classes, the higher as 
well as the lower, should have their share of. the 
opportunities for expansion afforded by our colonial 
empire ; he wished for a large infusion of refinement 
and culture to keep colonial life, public and private, 
at a high level ; he believed, and time has justified 
him, that the colonies could be withheld from setting 
up as independent republics, and welcomed every 
influence tending to retain them within the imperial 
system ; but he never believed that all the institution 
and all the class distinctions of Great Britain and 
Ireland could be replanted at the Antipodes. After 
enumerating some of the more obvious causes which 
render it c impossible to establish in a dependency the 



190 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

literal and exact transcript of the political institutions 
of an independent state,' he continues : — 

' It is clear enough, then, that in attempting to 
give to our colonies political institutions essentially 
modelled upon our own, it is idle to think of their 
adopting all our aristocratic peculiarities, be they ever 
so cherished and venerable, whether in Church or 
State. In the one or two of our most recently planted 
settlements ' [South Australia and New Zealand] 
' where pains have been taken in the first instance to 
transplant an organised society of rich and poor, land- 
holders, merchants, tradesmen, artisans and labourers 
all together, and to have them carry at once with 
them from home into the wilderness their church and 
schoolhouse, a state of things promises to grow up 
more like our own than is to be found in our older 
colonial possessions. But no such marked inequalities 
of rank as prevail at home can by any chance be 
made a lasting feature of the social state, even in 
colonies so founded. As to hereditary rank, with here 
and there perhaps a solitary exception, it is a thing 
not to be thought of. The political franchise, too, 
must be more extended, and representation more 
clearly apportioned to population than with us. And 
as regards privileged church-establishments, every 
colony had need be allowed altogether its own way. 
If it wants them, they are easily to be had. If not, 
it will be worse than folly to try to force it to put 
up with them.' 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 191 

Some six months before the publication of this essay 
Wakefield had been recalled from the pleasant occupa- 
tion of exercising irresponsible government in Canada 
as the secret counsellor of Sir Charles Metcalfe by an 
event at once distressing to his private affections and 
sinister for the interests of the New Zealand Company 
— the death of his brother Arthur in the massacre of 
Wairau in the preceding June. There was then no 
direct communication between New Zealand and 
America, and the ship that brought the heavy news had 
left the spot of the globe which then held Wakefield far 
behind her, as she ploughed the second great ocean on 
her path towards London, where the tidings took ship 
again, and overtook him after making more than half 
the circuit of the globe. He immediately returned to 
England, which he reached in a state of the deepest 
depression. His personal fascination, so potent with 
all, was most deeply felt by children and the young. 
Mrs Storr, then little Miss Allom, who, in her own 
words, would have been glad of an opportunity of 
dying for him, remembers him as he sat lost in gloom 
at the end of the drawing-room in Hart Street, 
Bloomsbury. She nestled against him trying to sooth 
him, and her mother called her away. c Let her be,' 
answered Wakefield, c let her be ! ' 



CHAPTER VII 

THE PLANTING OF NEW ZEALAND THE COMPANY'S 

INSTRUCTIONS TO ITS AGENTS COLONEL WILLIAM 

WAKEFIELD HIS LAND PURCHASES — NATIVE RE- 
SERVES TREATY OF WAITANGI FRUSTRATION 

OF FRENCH DESIGNS UPON THE COLONY 

The Durham Report became a more important factor 
in the history of Britain's colonial empire than even 
the Wakefield system, yet the Canada expedition was 
no more than a brilliant episode in the life of Dur- 
ham's counsellor. We must follow him back to New 
Zealand, the colony of his predilection, although for 
long he is not more immediately visible in the events 
occurring upon the islands than the dramatist whose 
pen has filled the theatre, but who never appears in 
person upon the stage. 

The pioneers of the Tory left England amply pro- 
vided with instructions from the Company, throughout 
the greater part of which Wakefield's manly style is 
easily recognisable. These it is not too much to 
characterise as models of wisdom as concerned the 
direction of the Company's affairs, and of fairness as re- 

192 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 193 

garded the rights of the various classes affected by the 
undertaking. They were so framed as not merely to 
prescribe rules of action, but to answer many of the 
most specious objections against colonization in New 
Zealand, and against the measures which it was ab- 
solutely necessary to adopt if colonization was to be 
effectively carried out. Those most anxiously weighed 
and carefully expressed related to that interference 
with aboriginal claims which cannot possibly be 
avoided if the white man is to fulfil his mission of 
civilising the earth, but which every just and humane 
person desires to reduce to a minimum. 

The language of the New Zealand directors 
breathes this spirit of justice and humanity. 

' The chief difficulty,' they say, * with which you 
may have to contend is that of convincing the natives 
that the expedition under your orders has no object 
hostile to them. They are necessarily suspicious in 
consequence of the ill-treatment which they have often 
received from Europeans. We recommend that you 
should on every occasion treat them with the most 
entire frankness, thoroughly explaining to them that 
you wish to purchase the land for the purpose of 
establishing a settlement of Englishmen there ; and 
you will abstain from completing any negotiation for 
a purchase of land until this, its probable result, shall 
be thoroughly understood by the native proprietors 
and by the tribe at large. Above all, you will be 
especially careful that all the owners of any tract of 



1 94 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

land which you may purchase shall be approving 
parties to the bargain, and that each of them receives 
his due share of the purchase money. You will fully 
explain that the Company intends to dispose of the 
property to individual settlers expected from England, 
and that you purchase, if at all, on the same terms as 
have formed the conditions of private bargains for land 
in other parts of the islands. 

' But in one respect you will not fail to establish a 
very important difference between the purchases of 
the Company and those which have hitherto been 
made by every class of buyers. Wilderness land, it is 
true, is worth nothing to its native owners, or worth 
nothing more than the trifle they can obtain for it. 
We are not therefore to make much account of the 
inadequacy of the purchase money according to 
English notions of the value of land. The land is 
really of no value, and can become valuable only by 
means of a great outlay of capital on emigration and 
settlement. But at the same time it may be doubted 
whether the native owners have ever been entirely 
aware of the consequences that would result from such 
cessions, as have already been made to a great extent, 
of the whole of the lands of a tribe. Justice demands, 
not merely that these consequences should be as far as 
possible explained to them, but that the superior intel- 
ligence of the buyers should also be exerted to guard 
them against the evils which, after all, they may not 
be capable of anticipating. The danger to which 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 195 

they are exposed, and which they cannot well foresee, 
is that of finding themselves entirely without landed 
property, and therefore without consideration, in the 
midst of a society where, through immigration and 
settlement, land has become a valuable property. 
Absolutely they would suffer little or nothing from 
having parted with land which they do not use and 
cannot exchange ; but relatively they would suffer a 
great deal, inasmuch as their social position would be 
very inferior to that of the race who had settled 
amongst them, and given value to their now worthless 
territory. If the advantage of the natives alone were 
consulted, it would be better perhaps that they should 
remain for ever the savages which they are. This 
consideration appears never to have occurred to any of 
those who have hitherto purchased lands from the 
natives of New Zealand. It was first suggested by 
the New Zealand Association of 1837 ; and it has 
great weight with the present Company. In accord- 
ance with a plan which the Association of 1837 was 
desirous that a legislative enactment should extend to 
every purchase of land from the natives, as well past as 
future, you will take care to mention in every booka- 
booka, or contract for land, that a proportion of the 
territory ceded, equal to one-tenth of the whole, will 
be reserved by the Company, and held in trust by them 
for the future benefit of the chief families of the tribe. 
' The intended reserves of land are regarded as far 
more important to the natives than anything which 



196 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

you will have to pay in the shape of purchase money. 
At the same time we are desirous that the purchase 
money should be less inadequate, according to English 
notions of the value of land, than has been generally 
the case in purchases of territory from the New 
Zealanders. Some of the finest tracts of land, we are 
assured, have been obtained by missionary catechists 
and others who really possessed nothing, or next to 
nothing. In case land should be offered to you for 
such mere trifles as a few blankets or hatchets, which 
have heretofore been given for considerable tracts, you 
will not accept the offer without adding to the goods 
required such a quantity as may be of real service to 
all the owners of the land. It is not intended that 
you should set an example of heedless profusion in this 
respect ; but the Company are desirous that in all their 
transactions with the natives the latter should derive 
some immediate and obvious benefit by the intercourse.' 
These instructions are indeed admirable. They 
grapple at once with the difficulty of the apparent 
inadequacy of the price at which the uncultivated 
lands of a people destitute of the circulating medium 
must be acquired, and indicate the means by which 
the bargain may notwithstanding be made as advan- 
tageous to the sellers as to the buyers. When at a 
later period Sir George Grey, the Maori's friend par 
excellence^ made extensive acquisitions of land in the 
Middle Island, he acted entirely in their spirit, and 
could do no otherwise. Much, however, depends upon 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 197 

the character of the agent entrusted with the execu- 
tion of instructions drafted at the other side of the 
world. Colonel Wakefield's antecedents might have 
been deemed unfavourable. We have become ac- 
quainted with him as a member of the giddy society 
at Paris among whom the Turner plot was hatched, 
and as punished for his complicity with a penalty not 
less severe than that meted out to his brother. He 
had himself eloped with his wife, the daughter of a 
baronet, and had been seriously embarrassed in his 
circumstances, both before and after the Turner 
episode and its consequences. On the other hand, 
those who knew him, or have retained the tradition of 
him, unanimously express amazement at his participa- 
tion in such a transaction, and declare that this could 
only be attributed to the contagion of the Parisian 
circle, and to the irresistible magnetic influence which 
Edward Gibbon exercised upon most men, and especi- 
ally upon a brother seven years younger, and 
particularly open to it from having been attached to 
him at the Turin embassy while a mere youth. In 
maturer life William appeared not more shrewd than 
trustworthy. He had fought for freedom in Spain and 
Portugal, where he had been especially distinguished 
for coolness, and was about to distinguish himself in 
New Zealand by munificent generosity. We shall 
see that he retained the confidence of the Company 
through nine most difficult years, and his name is still 
cherished by the descendants of those whose hardships 



198 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

were shared by him. In such a conflict of evidence, 
it is fairest to resort to the testimony which the man 
has unconsciously bequeathed concerning himself, and 
this is wholly in his favour. In the portions of his 
correspondence which remain, Colonel Wakefield 
appears the tender father, the careful guardian, the 
steady friend, the loyal servant of his employers, just 
and firm in his dealings with all men. 

Intellectually, William Wakefield is described by 
Mr Gisborne [New Zealand Rulers and Statesmen') as 
c a pale copy of his brother.' This may be in so far 
true, that William made no pretence to originality of 
genius, but he was as much the hand of the New 
Zealand Company as Edward Gibbon was its brain. 
Among the hosts of ideas which Edward's creative 
mind was perpetually emitting, a certain proportion 
were almost inevitably unsound ; he was not always 
careful to sift these out, and sometimes damaged him- 
self and his cause by advancing arguments or proposals 
obviously untenable. William, on the other hand, 
was a man of close reserve, and of that peculiarly 
baffling secretiveness which is not synonymous with 
taciturnity. c His manner,' says Mr Gisborne, i was 
attractive, and, in outward appearance, sympathetic, 
but the inner man was out of sight and hearing.'' 
' Of medium height,' says Mr Crawford, c compactly 
built, fair in complexion and Saxon in appearance and 
temperament, astute and reticent, he had seen much 
of the world, both British and foreign, and could make 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 



99 



himself a very pleasant companion. People said he 
was always so, except when spoken to on business.'' His 
general conduct of affairs attests his eminent talents 
as an organiser ; and his official despatches and 
journals, which ought to be reprinted in a volume, 
are excellent reading. 1 

Among other important points, the instructions 
given to Colonel Wakefield contemplated the choice 
of a metropolis for the future colony. 'You should 
endeavour to make an extensive purchase on the 
shores of that harbour, which, all things considered, 
shall appear to offer the greatest facilities as a general 
trading depot, and port of export and import for all 
parts of the islands, as a centre of commerce for 
collecting and exporting the produce of the islands, 
and for the reception and distribution of foreign goods. 
In making this selection, you will not forget that 
Cook's Strait forms part of the shortest route from 
the Australian colonies to England, and that the 
best harbour in that channel must inevitably become 
the most frequented port of colonized New Zealand. 
That harbour in Cook's Strait is the most valuable, 
which combines with ample security and convenience 
as a resort for ships the nearest vicinity to, or the best 
natural means of communication with, the greatest 
extent of fertile territory. So far as we are at present 
informed, Port Nicholson appears superior to any 

1 They will mostly be found in the appendix to the report of the 
Parliamentary Committee of 1844. 



zoo BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

other.' This answers Mr Reeves's criticism, at first 
sight cogent, that the Company should have confined 
its operations to the Middle Island, where natives were 
few. It is true that such a course would have relieved 
it from many of its embarrassments, although, after all, 
the greatest disaster it ever encountered occurred in 
the Middle Island, but would have thrust it into a 
corner, and left the choice of the metropolitan site to 
others. No important town has ever arisen on the 
southern shore of Cook's Strait. Colonel Wakefield, 
nevertheless, was directed to obtain land c around one 
good harbour, at least, on each side of Cook's Strait.' 
He was further enjoined to keep a journal, to inform 
the Company of every minute particular, to afford 
every assistance to the scientific members of the 
expedition, ' to show all missionaries the respect 
deserved by the sacrifice they have made as the 
pioneers of civilisation,' to have divine service on 
Sunday, and abstain, as far as possible, from work on 
that day, not so much from scruple, as because the 
natives, no great workers on week days, deemed the 
Englishman who worked when he might have rested 
the most degraded of mankind. Two of the instruc- 
tions are especially remarkable : — 

'We must now mention another rule which you 
will not fail to impress on all your subordinates ; 
namely, the propriety of carefully avoiding anything 
like exaggeration in describing the more favourable 
features of the country. Let the bad be stated as 




MAP OF NEW ZEALAND, 1837. 

(Showing progress of settlement up to 1850.) 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 201 

plainly and fully as the good ; so that the Company, 
hearing the whole truth as well as nothing but the 
truth, may run no risk of misleading others. 

c You will consider any act of aggression or affront 
from any of the Company's servants towards any 
native of New Zealand as a sufficient reason for 
immediate dismissal from the Company's service, and 
in the most public manner.' 

Colonel Wakefield's expedition, as already stated, 
sighted New Zealand on 16th August; and Captain 
Hobson reached the Bay of Islands on 29th January 
1840. The first considerable body of emigrants had 
already arrived at Port Hardy on 22d January and 
proceeded to Port Nicholson to take advantage of the 
land purchases which Colonel Wakefield had been 
industriously making. The two rival authorities were 
thus in presence, although the distance between the 
Bay of Islands and Port Nicholson for some time 
prevented actual contact. Before leaving England, 
Hobson had addressed a letter to Lord Normanby, 
pointing out eleven defects in his instructions. He 
had obtained scant satisfaction, but a clearer concep- 
tion of the exigencies of the case compelled Lord 
John Russell, Lord Normanby's successor, to modify 
these instructions in several respects. At the same 
time the Company were obliged to beat a retreat 
upon an important point. Their intending colonists, 
finding themselves bound for a land where, in conse- 
quence of the obstinate refusal of the British Govern- 



202 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

ment to assume sovereignty, no legal jurisdiction over 
members of its body existed, endeavoured to cure the 
defect by a voluntary association, and a court elected 
by mutual consent. This righteous determination 
was announced with much solemnity on the sailing 
of the expedition from Blackwall (September 1839), 
but the Company soon learned with consternation 
on the highest legal authority that c if one of the 
parties to the agreement should commit a murder 
or an assault, and should be executed or imprisoned 
accordingly, all the parties to the agreement would be 
liable to a prosecution for murder, or an action for 
false imprisonment.' The directors, who had them- 
selves prompted the colonists' action, could but send 
after them c their earnest advice and anxious hope that 
the agreement may not be put in force by anybody.' 
Lord John Russell should have lost no time in pro- 
claiming British sovereignty, but he still left action to 
Governor Hobson, nor was he impressed by an able 
statement, evidently drafted by Wakefield, of the 
rights of the British Crown, and the imminent danger 
of French aggression in New Zealand, which the 
company addressed to Lord Palmerston c as belonging 
to the Foreign Department of Her Majesty's Govern- 
ment.' He referred it to Lord John Russell, who took 
four months to answer, 1 and at last, under pressure 

1 Foreign Office, nt/i March 1840. — Lord Palmerston desires me to 
refer you to my letter of the 15th November last, and to request that 
you will move Lord John Russell to favour him with a reply to that 
letter. — Correspondence relative to Nc-w Zealand, p. 68. 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 203 

from Palmerston, whose view of the matter was 
probably widely different, replied by an enumeration 
of formal difficulties which five minutes could have 
brushed away. 

Colonel Wakefield, meanwhile, if indulgence in a 
graphic but familiar expression may be permitted, had 
been as busy as the devil in a gale of wind. He had, 
as we have seen, anchored at Port Nicholson on 
24th September. On 27th September he bought, for 
a liberal assortment of all sorts of articles, from muskets 
down to shaving brushes, the port and the adjoining 
territory j on 24th October he concluded a similar 
purchase on the southern side of the Strait ; and on 
8th November he purchased large tracts upon both, 
acquiring altogether, or supposing himself to acquire^ 
a territory about the size of Ireland. The districts 
acquired were respectively entitled North and South 
Durham, names afterwards disused. He had, indeed, 
no time to lose. The hesitations of the Home 
Government had advertised the profits which specu- 
lators might hope to make in New Zealand, and 
nothing but the swift voyage of the Tory and his 
own promptitude enabled him to baffle a shoal of 
Australian land-sharks. While he was negotiating, 
a small trader arrived from Sydney with ' deeds from 
various merchants to be filled up by the chiefs' 
names,' more Batmanico^ and of course lacking in 
the reserve of land for the benefit of the natives as 
prescribed by the regulations of the New Zealand 



204 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

Company. 1 Colonel Wakefield wrote with perfect 
truth : l It must be remembered that nine- tenths of 
the land is without an inhabitant to dispute posses- 
sion, and that the payment I have made to the 
owners is large when valued by the standard of 
exchange known amongst them, and perfectly satis- 
factory to the sellers.' Well it might be, for the 
literary capabilities of the New Zealanders had been 
recognised by an allotment of slates and pencils, 
and a gross of Jews' harps had been contributed to 
stimulate any latent taste for music. There was, 
nevertheless, a grievous flaw in the title which 
Colonel Wakefield conceived himself to have ac- 
quired ; the sellers, according to New Zealand ideas, 
had no right to sell. To Europeans long ago 
emerged from the savage state, it seems almost 
incomprehensible that societies should exist where 
co-operative associations cannot be bound by the 
majority, and where no individual has the least bit 
of land that he can call his own. But such was 
actually the case in New Zealand. No land 
purchase could be considered safe unless every adult 
male of the tribe had been consulted and had given 
his sanction, even though he were the captive of 

1 * Mr John Wright, settler at the Bay of Islands, has a property of 
which three of the boundary lines are well denned, but the fourth 
boundary line being " as far as the said John Wright shall think proper," 
it will be a matter of some difficulty for future doctors of the civil law 
in New Zealand to decide where that boundary shall be. — Lang, New 
Zealand in 1839. 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 205 

another clan, or serving on board a whaler, or ful- 
filling an engagement with Mr Barnum. Such a 
condition, all but impossible of fulfilment in any 
case, was most manifestly so in the circumstances of 
haste under which Colonel Wakefield acted. The 
inevitable neglect led to a host of evils — misunder- 
standings and consequent wars with the natives, 
quarrels between the representatives of the Company 
and the Crown, the infliction of grievous hardships 
upon innocent settlers by the invalidation of titles 
upon which they had every right to rely, and the 
extent to which bargains, believed to be concluded, 
were opened and reopened ad infinitum. Mr Reeves 
is perfectly justified in remarking that ' the first 
occupation of New Zealand was rushed, and, like 
everything else that is done in a hurry, it was in 
part done very badly. The settlement of the North 
Island should not have been begun until after an 
understanding had been come to with the Imperial 
authorities and the missionaries, and on a proper 
and legal system of land purchase.' But this was 
no fault of the Company, which had been vainly 
trying to come to an understanding with the 
Government and the missionaries ever since June 
1837, and had at last been goaded into activity by 
the imminent danger that French annexation would 
be the consummation of all things. The very step 
into which, to the nation's unspeakable advantage, 
they drove the Government, of proclaiming British 



2 o6 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

sovereignty, might have been their own ruin. 
Though the subsequent action of the Government's 
representative in annulling all land transactions 
previous to the annexation could have been fore- 
seen by no one, it was to be expected that as soon 
as the authority of the Crown was proclaimed in 
New Zealand, all subsequent alienations of land 
would be prohibited, and that, consequently, if the 
Company did not anticipate this step by extensive 
purchases, it would be unable to fulfil its obligations 
to the large body of emigrants for whom it had 
undertaken to find settlements, most of whom were 
already actually on their way. This, even more 
than the dread of the speculative land-sharks from 
Sydney, explains the preternatural purchasing power 
of Colonel Wakefield, to whom the cognomen of 
1 Wideawake,' into which his family name was 
altered by the Maoris, was to a great extent applic- 
able, and would have been even more so if he had 
surmised that the crafty New Zealand chiefs knew 
more about New Zealand land titles than he did, 
and were chuckling even then at the prospect of 
selling their land again and again, even unto seventy 
times seven. 

The commercial intercourse of civilised nations 
and barbarians, especially as concerns dealing with 
land, raises difficult problems for the jurist and 
philanthropist. The maxim, l property has its duties 
as well as its rights,' applies to savage quite as much 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 207 

as to civilised man. It cannot be admitted that a 
tribe of cannibals has a right to retain large tracts 
of the earth's surface, on or near which they happen 
to have established themselves, in an unproductive 
and useless condition. It is the duty and the very 
raison <Petre of the civilised man to develop the 
resources of the earth, and if he neglected this he 
would be punished by the ills that follow in the 
train of over-population at home. Yet, as a civilised 
tenant cannot well settle under a cannibal suzerain, 
he must in some manner acquire his land unless he 
can first civilise his landlord. The latter experiment 
was tried in New Zealand by the missionaries, and 
failed because it was impossible to shut out other 
European influences of a pernicious nature, insomuch 
that civilisation was far outrun by depopulation. 
Traders and land speculators had their own methods, 
which may be defined as taking advantage of the 
ignorance of the savage, and buying him out for a 
song. Equity and humanity must alike disapprove ; 
yet part of the disapprobation with which such pro- 
ceedings have been visited arises from an erroneous 
conception of the rights of property among bar- 
barians. There was commonly no development, no 
reclamation, not even any occupation to establish a 
title morally valid. Large tracts spoken of as though 
they had been transmitted from father to son since 
the arrival of the first inhabitants, with title-deeds 
tattooed upon the persons of the natives, were utterly 



208 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

waste and entirely worthless to the nominal possessors, 
conferring no advantage or privilege but the right of 
shooting rats. The natives, except as regarded the 
land actually brought under cultivation, were not pro- 
prietors but squatters, with rights comparable to that 
possessed by an English cottager of grazing his 
donkey upon a common. So opines Vattel, first 
among the expounders of the law of nations. It is 
sufficiently ridiculous to observe the deference paid 
to such shadowy pretensions, so long as the claimant 
is black brown or red, by writers who would oust 
the white proprietor in every country who has com- 
plied with every legal and moral condition of owner- 
ship, by open violence or the more cowardly device 
of an oppressive land tax. This deserves no other 
name than cant ; but it is no less certain that every 
bona fide claim, however indefinite, ought to be fully 
acknowledged and satisfied to its full worth. But 
how is this compensation to be made ? There is 
something shocking to refined feeling in acquiring 
the possessions of poor ignorant people for trinkets 
and cloth, or even for tools and weapons. It is 
true that these commodities have an immense value 
in their eyes, but the civilised purchaser knows well 
that this value is partly fictitious, and that the really 
useful part of the consideration he tenders will wear 
out in time and leave nothing to replace it. Money 
multiplies itself, but money in the then condition of 
the natives would have been useless to them and 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 209 

incomprehensible. The New Zealand Company 
met the difficulty in the only way in which it can 
be met, by the reservation for the natives of a portion 
of their land, which, though comparatively small, 
could, through the development of the country by 
European colonization, come to be far more valu- 
able to them than the whole. Wakefield put the 
matter into a nutshell before the Committee of 
1840: — 

' The terms were, a payment, in the first instance, 
of various goods, such as the natives require, but which 
the Company regard as a merely nominal price. They 
have paid for their lands a much higher price than has 
commonly been paid by other purchasers in the first 
instance ; but the consideration which they offer to 
the natives, and which they regard as the true 
purchase money of the land, is the reserved eleventh, 
which eleventh, by means of the expenditure of the 
Company, acquires, in a very short time, a higher 
value than all the land possessed before. I feel myself 
quite satisfied that if the measure were to proceed in 
the best way, every acre of the land reserved would be 
worth at least thirty shillings ; so that there would be 
an endowment of three millions sterling in the course 
of time as a native provision.' 

Mr Buller (not Charles Buller) pertinently in- 
quires : — . 

( What security is there that the natives will have 
the benefit of it ? 

o 



zio BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

c There is no security at present, because the 
Government has hitherto refused to let law be estab- 
lished in New Zealand, so that it is impossible to 
create a trust. The Company are very desirous of 
placing this land in trust for the benefit of the natives. 
They have considered the subject a good deal, but 
they have found great difficulty in defining, till they 
have better information, what the trusts ought to be. 
Their objects in reserving these lands has been to 
preserve the native race. They believe that it will be 
impossible to preserve the native race, that the native 
race in New Zealand will undergo the same fate 
which has attended other people in their situation, 
unless their chief families can be preserved in a state 
of civilisation in the same relative superiority of 
position as they before enjoyed in savage life ; and 
with this view the Company is desirous of investing 
them with property. But if it placed the property 
at once at their disposal, they would sell it for a trifle. 
It became, therefore, necessary to create a permanent 
trust. That the Company will do as soon as they 
possibly can ; and in the meantime they have ap- 
pointed a commissioner, whom they have sent out 
for the purpose of preserving, letting and talcing care 
of those lands.' 

These roseate anticipations, of course, were based 
on the supposition that the Company's purchases 
would not be interfered with, and when they were 
cut down from twenty millions of acres to two 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 211 

hundred and eighty-three thousand, the possibility 
of forming any considerable fund for the benefit of 
the natives came to an end. 

There seems no reason to charge the New Zealand 
Company with indifference to the well-being of the 
native race. The one fault was the want of due 
inquiry into the validity of the titles supposed to be 
conveyed by the native vendors ; and this was forced 
upon Colonel Wakefield by the necessity for extreme 
dispatch, lest the Company should in the meantime 
be deprived of all purchasing power. Far otherwise 
would it have been if, instead of stealing away 
from a hostile and jealous Government, the Tory 
had sailed under Government auspices, and with an 
Imperial Commissioner on board. 

The Imperial Commissioner who did sail, and who, 
through no fault of his own, sailed into the north of 
the colonists' opinion, had arrived at the Bay of Islands. 
Captain Hobson had touched at Sydney, where he 
took council with the resolute and autocratic 
Governor, Sir George Gipps, his immediate official 
superior, who on 14th January issued a proclamation 
annulling by anticipation all purchases of land that 
might be made after that date. Hobson's instructions 
did not allow him to take the simple and common- 
sense course of proclaiming the sovereignty of Great 
Britain by right of discovery, though Captain Cook 
had done as much seventy years previously. It was 
necessary to obtain a treaty of cession from the natives, 



212 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

who were convened for the purpose at Waitangi 
[Sounding Water^ so called from a cascade). Had 
they refused, as they were very near doing at the 
instigation of the Roman Catholic missionary bishop, 
the Governor would have been placed in the most 
painful and ludicrous position, and would have had 
no locus standi in the islands. Happily they yielded 
under the influence of the famous English missionary, 
Henry Williams. The treaty was signed on 6th 
February, 1 but four months were spent in ob- 
taining the concurrence of native chiefs in other 
parts of the islands. It was not until 17th June 
1840 that British sovereignty was proclaimed in the 
Middle Island. Had the French been more alert, 
this delay would have had serious consequences. 
But it was not until July that a French frigate, 
U Aube^ appeared at the Bay of Islands with orders 
to take possession of Akaroa in the Middle Island. 
Had not Wakefield compelled the British Govern- 
ment to send Hobson out, or had the treaty of 
Waitangi fallen through, there would have been 
nothing to prevent this, for the Government had 
repudiated their perfectly valid title by right of dis- 
covery, and could have alleged no other. The 

1 A diary recording the progress of the negotiations from day to day 
was kept by the Rev. W. Colenso, and was published at Wellington in 
1890. Mr Colenso expressed his doubts whether the chiefs understood 
what they were signing, but His Excellency thought he had done as much 
to enlighten them as could be expected from anybody ignorant of their 
language. 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 213 

Middle Island might then have become another 
New Caledonia. Even as it was, France could 
have set up a claim of pre-emption in 1838 by a 
French whaling master, who had actually paid one 
hundred and fifty francs as earnest money. Hobson, 
however, divined the French captain's intention, and 
hurried Captain Owen Stanley in the Britomart to 
the spot. Stanley beat the French frigate by four 
days, and the sight of the British flag flying scared 
V Aube to sea again. She, nevertheless, disembarked 
some intending settlers, who eventually, for the most 
part, migrated to the Marquesas. 

In this lame fashion did New Zealand eventually 
hobble into the ranks of the British colonies and 
the Maories become British subjects. Apart from 
these results, the treaty of Waitangi was no matter 
for congratulation. It could not have been obtained 
at all without an enormous and uncalled for conces- 
sion, the recognition, in spite of Vattel, of the ab- 
solute right of seventy thousand savages to sixty- 
six millions of acres of valuable land, by far the 
greater part of which they had never occupied, and 
were incapable of turning to account in any way. 
This carried the recognition of the tribal tenure 
along with it, and native sovereignty and native 
jurisprudence together opened a Pandora's box of 
ills for the unfortunate settlers, thus powerfully de- 
scribed by the present Agent - General for New 
Zealand, the Hon. W. P. Reeves : — 



2i 4 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

i Had Captain Hobson been able to conceive what 
was entailed in the piecemeal purchase of a country- 
held under tribal ownership, it is difficult to think 
that he would have signed the treaty without hesi- 
tation. He could not, of course, imagine that he 
was giving legal force to a system under which 
the buying of a block of land would involve years 
of bargaining, even when a majority of its owners 
wished to sell ; that the ascertainment of a title 
would mean tedious and costly examination by 
courts of experts of a labyrinth of strange and 
conflicting barbaric customs ; that land might be 
paid for again and again, and yet be declared un- 
sold ; that an almost empty wilderness might be 
bought first from its handful of occupants, then 
from the conquerors who had laid it waste, and 
yet after all be reclaimed by returned slaves or 
fugitives who had quitted it years before.' 

It is now easy to discern what the Government 
ought to have done. Instead of thwarting the 
original New Zealand Association, they should have 
reposed a generous though not a blind trust in it. 
They should have at once incorporated New Zealand 
in the Empire, and ruled it through the Association, 
enjoying the status and subjected to the restraints of 
a chartered company, and under the surveillance of an 
agent of the Government. They should have pro- 
vided a law-making power which might at a stroke 
have got rid of the nuisance of tribal titles to land, 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 215 

while the executive should have seen that the real 
interest of the natives did not suffer. The adminis- 
tration, apart from the Association's share in it, should 
from the first have been in stronger hands than those 
of a captain in the navy, taking orders from the 
Governor of another colony. A first-rate man should 
have been chosen, strong in ability and devotion, able 
to overawe, if need were, both natives and colonists, 
and not unprovided with naval and military force. 
The England of Victoria, no less than anciently the 
England of Elizabeth, had many rising young men 
competent for such a mission, enthusiastic at the 
prospect of building a new State, and to whom three 
or four years of such experience would have been 
invaluable. The envoy would have returned an 
accomplished Colonial Minister, and qualified for 
activity in any sphere. What if the choice had fallen 
upon William Ewart Gladstone ? 



CHAPTER VIII 

settlement of wellington ill-judged pro- 
clamation of governor hobson auckland 

made the seat of government the com- 
pany and the colonial office massacre of 

wairau — governors fitzroy and grey 

wakefield's illness 

Governmental mismanagement had created two rival 
authorities in New Zealand, one clothed with the 
attributes of legality, the other representing the brain 
and muscle of the colony. Before Captain Hobson 
could take any steps to assert the supremacy with 
which he had undoubtedly been invested, the pioneers 
of the Tory had been reinforced by the arrival of six 
emigrant ships between 22d January and 7th March, 
bearing the choicest contingent of colonists, the South 
Australian excepted, that had come to form a British 
settlement since the days of the Mayflower, and 
superior to the Pilgrim Fathers in their average 
standard of culture, and as representatives of all classes 
of the nation. All landed at Port Nicholson. The 
history of the infant settlement, almost from day to 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 217 

day, may be read in Colonel Wakefield's reports and 
in Edward Jerningham Wakefield's Adventures in 
New Zealand^ a book which will always hold a 
distinguished place among English books of travel, 
notwithstanding an atmosphere of controversy con- 
ducted with questionable taste and temper, and 
an unevenness mainly attributable to its having 
been compiled from letters written home. ' Then 
between thirteen and fourteen years of age,' says 
Mr Albert Allom in his delightful pamphlet of re- 
miniscences of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, ' it was 
my great happiness to be sent for on every arrival of 
despatches, in order that I might have the first perusal 
of the diary of E. J. Wakefield, giving an account of 
the expedition of Colonel Wakefield which founded 
Wellington.' Colonel Wakefield would undoubtedly 
be worshipped by the present race of Wellingtonians 
as a hero, did the Hellenic dispensation still obtain. 
After one abortive attempt at location, the city was 
founded in its present picturesque but confined 
situation, compared by Lord Lyttelton to that of 
Ilfracombe, cramped and hemmed in by furzy hills* 
but with deep water to the shore, and with the 
magnificent central position which has made it, 
though but fifth among New Zealand cities in popu- 
lation, the capital of the country. It was originally 
called Britannia, but Edward Gibbon Wakefield, 
among whose virtues gratitude held a conspicuous 
place, remembered the service which the Duke of 



218 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

Wellington had rendered to the South Australian 
colonists, and how the intended acknowledgment had 
been thwarted. By his interposition, and as a per- 
sonal favour to himself, the city received the name of 
Wellington. 

For a short time affairs at Wellington went on 
propitiously. Up to the date (4th June) when 
Lieutenant Shortland, Colonial Secretary, arrived to 
proclaim the Queen's sovereignty, and put an end to 
the provisional state of things which had hitherto 
obtained, * nearly fifteen hundred English people and 
four hundred untutored savages had lived for five 
months without any serious breach of the laws, to 
which they were bound by nothing more than a 
voluntary agreement, and which could summon no 
physical force to their assistance.' Much ill-feeling- 
was unfortunately created by a perfectly needless 
proclamation of Governor Hobson, declaring that the 
measures necessarily adopted by the colonists for self- 
protection until a regular government could be 
established 'amounted to high treason,' and styling 
the magistrates provisionally appointed 'an usurping 
government.' To his further definition of the Port 
Nicholson settlers as 'adventurers' they replied with 
spirit. ' It is true that we are adventurers. We have 
ventured property and life, our own property and that 
of our children, in an undertaking which was rightly 
called by the sagacious Bacon heroic. If our adven- 
ture be successful we shall have laid the foundation of 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 219 

a community speaking the language and enjoying the 
institutions of England.' Hobson, nevertheless, meant 
well, and would probably have acted otherwise if he 
had seen Wellington for himself, but he was detained 
in the north by a stroke of paralysis. A great oppor- 
tunity of conciliating all classes of settlers was lost 
when he proclaimed the seat of government at Auck- 
land, founded by himself under the advice of Henry 
Williams, on a site admirably selected for a city, but 
so severed from the rest of the colony that correspond- 
ence with Wellington frequently went by way of 
Sydney. The original plan of laying out, long ago 
amended, had many fantastic features, and seemed 
better adapted to serve the purposes of speculators in 
land than those of bona fide colonists. In judging 
Hobson's proceedings, it must be remembered that, 
though as a naval officer he was a captain, as a 
colonial governor he was but a lieutenant, and owed 
deference to his superior, Sir George Gipps, Governor 
of New South Wales, one of the most masterful rulers 
our Australian possessions have ever had. Gipps, to 
his credit, was engaged at home in a campaign for the 
protection of New Zealand against the ravenous land 
speculators of Australia, whose ideas are well illustrated 
by the tale, be it vero or ben trovato^ of one of them 
who proclaimed from the summit of the highest hill 
available, C I claim for myself all the land I can see, 
and all that I cannot see I claim for my son John.' 
At this system, but no less at the rights and just 



220 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

expectations of the settlers who had come out on the 
faith of the Company's promises, Gipps struck an 
overwhelming blow by his Act of 4th August 1840, 
annulling all titles to land in New Zealand ( which are 
not or may not be hereafter allowed by Her Majesty.' 
The Act was as illogical as despotic, for it extended to 
all transactions which had taken place before New 
Zealand had become a British possession -, otherwise, 
however, the Governor's purpose of frustrating the 
Australian land speculators would not have been 
attained. All the mischief came from the Home 
Government's delay in proclaiming New Zealand an 
independent colony, and their omission to send out a 
governor and a council along with the Company's 
first expedition. New Zealand having in the mean- 
time been declared a separate colony, the Act was 
temporarily disallowed at home, but was re-enacted by 
Hobson in June 1841, Government undertaking to 
send out a commissioner to investigate claims. It is 
only just to Sir George Gipps to state that, upon 
receiving a deputation from Wellington, he made a 
temporary compromise which was not regarded as 
unsatisfactory, but there could be no finality until the 
conclusion of the commissioner's inquiries. 'This 
functionary's award,' says Mr Reeves, ' was not given 
for years. When he did give it, he cut down the 
Company's purchase of twenty million acres to two 
hundred and eighty-three thousand. Meantime, the 
long and weary months dragged on, and the unfor- 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 221 

tunate settlers were either not put in possession of 
their land at all, or had as little security for their farms 
as for their lives.' 

It could not be expected that the New Zealand 
Company at home would tolerate these aggressions 
on its property. It had struck deep root. 'New 
Zealand House,' was established in Broad Street Build- 
ings, and Wakefield had taken up his private residence 
under its roof. Numbers of persons had become 
interested in the fortunes of the Company ; and New 
Zealand, without the stimulus of gold and diamond 
mining, filled nearly the same place in the popular 
imagination as South Africa does now. The emigrants, 
as Wakefield meant they should, included represent- 
atives of every class of society j among them were 
Domett, the friend of Browning, and Charles Armitage 
Brown, the friend of Keats. When, on 27th June 
1839, Mr H. G. Ward brought forward his resolutions 
in the House of Commons on the subject of colonial 
lands, he was able to state that the association had 
sold 666 sections, containing 67,266 acres of land, for 
upwards of ^70,000. This was while the Tory was still 
on her voyage, before a single emigrant ship had been 
despatched, or a single acre bought in New Zealand 
on account of the Company. On 29th July a public 
drawing was held, to determine priority of choice in 
the selection of lots, by this time amounting to 
100,000 acres. The ladies, it was remarked, appeared 
the most daring speculators. Eleven thousand acres 



222 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

were set apart for the natives, whose representatives 
were fortunate in their drawings, every instance of 
their success eliciting loud cheers. The drawings — 
lotteries without blanks — continued until the company 
was obliged to suspend its operations. Every means 
was taken to lend eclat to the periodical despatches 
of emigrants. ' How well I remember,' exclaims Mr 
Allom, ' the steamer trips down the river and the 
grand dinners at Gravesend ! ' The original fare of 
eighty guineas was soon reduced to thirty-five. In 
1840 a Committee of the House of Commons, to be 
described more particularly in a subsequent chapter, 
sat to investigate New Zealand questions. The draft 
report of the chairman, Lord Eliot, was entirely 
favourable to the Company, but was rejected by the 
majority, who simply reported the evidence without 
making any recommendation. It produced, however, 
a considerable effect on the mind of Lord John 
Russell, who had succeeded Lord Normanby as 
Colonial Secretary, and who, if somewhat stiff" and 
supercilious, was at all events a statesman. 1 He 
came (November 1840) to an arrangement with the 
Company, guaranteeing them as many acres as should 
be equal to four times the number of pounds sterling 
expended in the despatch of ships and other necessary 
expenses, a virtual admission that the Company had 

1 * You once asked me how Stephen and I liked Lord John's way of 
doing business. Very much — very different to anything before him.' 
— Henry Taylor to Edivard Villkrs, October 1839. 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 223 

done well in preserving New Zealand to England by 
the despatch of the Tory. He agreed that the price 
of land should be a pound an acre, and that half the 
proceeds of sales should be expended in promoting 
immigration. He erected New Zealand into an inde- 
pendent government, and, unfortunately too late, 
directed Sir George Gipps to suspend the execution of 
his Sydney Land Act until further instructions. Above 
all, in February 1841, he gave the Company a legal 
status by bestowing upon it a charter of incorporation. 
Some troublesome questions respecting the amount 
actually expended by the Company, and the conse- 
quent extent of its claims under the agreement, 
remained to be settled, but these were mere questions 
of detail, and all might have gone well had Lord 
John Russell remained at the Colonial Office. Un- 
fortunately for the Britain of the South, though not 
for the Britain of the North, a change of govern- 
ment occurred in August 1841. The new Secretary 
of State, Lord Stanley, belonging to the opposite 
party in politics, was inaccessible to the private 
influences which had probably worked upon Lord 
John Russell, and his distinguished oratorical gifts and 
resolute vigour were unaccompanied by any insight 
into the problems of statesmanship. In the interim, 
the Company had lost (28th July 1840) its nominal 
head, Lord Durham, whose health had long disabled 
him from actual attention to its affairs, but who served 
it efficaciously after his death if, as is probable, Lord 



224 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

John Russell's regard for his memory had something 
to do with the changed attitude of the Colonial 
Office. Mr Somes, the Deputy Governor, succeeded 
him, and Wakefield became ostensibly a, as well as 
virtually the,- director, although his name will seldom 
be found appended to the official documents which he 
drafted or inspired : — 

So that the ram, that batters doivn the wall, 
For the great sivitig and rudeness of his poise, 
They place before his hand that made the engine ,• 
Or those that 'with the fineness of their souls 
By reason guide his execution. 

1 1 have not time,' Wakefield writes to his father, in 
October 1841, ' to attend to details; almost every 
hour of my day, to say nothing of nights, from 
year's end to year's end, being engaged in taking care 
of the principles and main points of our New Zealand 
enterprise, and in what Arthur calls "the manage- 
ment of people," which means the persuading of all 
sorts of dispositions to pull together for a common 
object.' 

In the course of 1841, Lord John Russell sent out 
to New Zealand two of the most distinguished men 
who ever went there, a pair of old Cambridge friends — 
George Augustus Selwyn as Bishop, and Sir William 
Martin as Chief Justice. Martin went out in the 
same vessel with Swainson, appointed Attorney- 
General, and ere they landed the two had prepared 
a legal system adapted for an infant colony, which 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 225 

shortly bore fruit in abundant legislation. Selwyn, 
not to be outdone, learned Maori from a native during 
the voyage, and arrived speaking it fluently. 

The Bishopric incarnated an idea of the New 
Zealand Company's already put forward in 1837. 
Wakefield had written to his sister Catherine in 
November 1841 : — l 

'We had a long and very satisfactory interview 
with the Bishop yesterday. The object of the Bishop's 
meeting with our committee was to come to some 
practical determination as to what was to be done 
for the Church of England and benefit of the natives 
in the Company's settlements ; and it was resolved 
accordingly, subject to the approval of our Court 
to-day — First, that the Company would advance, on 
the security of the native reserves at Wellington, 
^5000 for the purpose of immediately establishing 
schools for natives, where the children may live away 
from their parents. Secondly, that the Bishop and 
the Company agree to subscribe as much respectively 
as the other shall subscribe for endowment of the 
Church of England at Wellington, Wanganui, New 
Plymouth, and Nelson. The Bishop undertook for 
the great Societies and we for the Company. So there 
is a race between the Church and the Company as to 
which shall first collect the larger sum ; and the more 
either shall collect, the more precisely must the other 
furnish. We, having the money in hand, began with 

1 Printed in Dean Jacob's History of the Church of New Zealand. 
P 



226 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

£5000 for Nelson, which secures ,£10,000, the Church 
being bound to double our subscription. I shall do my 
utmost to get a large contribution from the Company 
for Wellington and New Plymouth. The Company 
has already contributed, in land and money, ^2000 to- 
wards the endowment of the New Zealand bishopric.' 
From the date of Lord Stanley's accession the 
annals of New Zealand for several years become 
disagreeable and uninviting. The historians of the 
period, from Mr Rusden on one side to Mr E. J. 
Wakefield on the other, offer a continual spectacle 
of crimination and recrimination, and the fatigued 
reader may well abandon the hope of arriving at 
any sound conclusion if he has not a firm grasp 
of the idea that while all parties concerned — agents 
of the Company, settlers, missionaries, officials — com- 
mitted many and grievous errors, the mistakes of 
individuals were unimportant in comparison with the 
fundamentally vicious situation created by the in- 
decision of the Home Government. All was confusion 
and uncertainty. The Company, deprived by the 
Government proclamation of their purchases for an 
indefinite period, until a commissioner should report 
what proportion he would allow them, and equally 
frustrated by Lord Stanley's action of the com- 
pensation Lord John Russell had promised them, 
could convey no valid titles to their colonists, who 
were tempted to abandon the settlement, but whose 
pluck and perseverance in their trials constitute a 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 227 

bright chapter of British colonial history. The 
reluctance to assume control of the country by a 
direct act of imperial authority had necessitated the 
treaty of Waitangi, which had recognised the 
natives as possessors of the soil, not merely where 
they had settled upon it, but where they were merely 
rovers across it, and had bound the British to respect 
native customs and traditions, even where these were 
virtually prohibitive of colonization. There could 
not be a stronger instance of this than in the case 
of Taranaki, otherwise New Plymouth, in the 
Northern Island, where a colony mainly drawn from 
Devon and Cornwall had been planted in 1841 by 
the New Plymouth Company, which had bought 
60,000 acres of land from the New Zealand Com- 
pany. These acres had been purchased by Colonel 
Wakefield from a tribe who claimed by right of 
conquest, but who had not themselves put the land 
to beneficial use. When the conquered tribe, at 
the time in a state of bondage to the victors, 
regained their freedom through the influence of 
Christianity, they demanded payment as proprietors. 
Was this preposterous claim to be adjudicated by 
English or by Maori law ? Under the latter it was 
possibly good ; at all events the successor of Hobson 
(who had died, more esteemed than regretted, on 
10th September 1842), Captain, afterwards Admiral, 
Fitzroy, thought so. ' Instead,' says an impartial 
authority, Mr Reeves, 'of paying them fairly for 



228 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

the 6o 5 ooo acres — which they did not require — he 
handed the bulk of it back to them, penning the 
unhappy white settlers up in a miserable strip of 
3200 acres. The result was the temporary ruin 
of the Taranaki settlement and the sowing of the 
seeds of an intense feeling of resentment and in- 
justice, which bore evil fruit in later days.' 

Admiral Fitzroy's motive for this excessive con- 
descension was probably fear of a native war, which 
his pliancy was more likely to invite than to avert. 
He did much worse in the Middle Island. Under 
the provisional administration of Lieutenant Shortland 
(September 1842 — January 1844), the most dismal 
tragedy that ever occurred in New Zealand had 
taken place. The settlement of Nelson, on Blind 
Bay in the Middle Island, had been founded in 
October 1841 by an expedition consisting of three 
vessels, the Arrow ^ the Will Watch and the Whitby, 
which had sailed on 28th April under the direction 
of Captain Arthur Wakefield, R.N., with whom 
we have already become acquainted, c not only an 
able pioneer leader,' says Mr Reeves, c but a man 
of high worth, of singularly fine and winning 
character, and far the most popular of his family.' » 

1 Bishop Selwyn says in an unpublished private letter : ' I believe 
that a more humane and judicious man than Captain Wakefield did not 
exist, or one more desirous of promoting a good understanding between 
the two races.' In Mr Gisborne's New Zealand Rulers and Statesmen, 
pp. 20-22, is a most beautiful character of Arthur Wakefield as the ideal 
colonist, written by Mr Alfred Domett, afterwards Prime Minister of 
New Zealand. 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 229 

The settlement was at first most prosperous, but by- 
June 1843, land difficulties arose with the natives, 
'tampered with,' Colonel Wakefield complained, 
1 by a host of missionaries, protectors, magistrates 
and commissioners.' Huts erected by the Company 
in the Wairau district were burned down by two 
native chiefs, Rauparaha and Rangihaiatea. What 
ensued is described in a letter from Colonel Wake- 
field to his sister Catherine, not hitherto published : — 
c The magistrates of Nelson granted a warrant 
against Rauparaha and Rangihaiatea for the offence, 
and the police magistrate (Mr Thompson), Arthur, 
and several gentlemen volunteers left Nelson, accom- 
panied by about forty labourers, to execute the 
warrant. They found the natives assembled in a 
strong position, where the police magistrate, very 
rashly and against the opinion of others, insisted 
upon carrying his point of arresting the chiefs. An 
accidental shot brought on a volley from each side, 
after which the white men, being country labourers, 
unused to arms and discipline, fled, in spite of the 
urgent efforts of Arthur and Mr Howard to rally 
them. A truce was most unadvisedly demanded by 
means of waving a white handkerchief, the whole 
party of Englishmen surrendered to savages flushed 
with victory and inflamed with the taste for blood. 
The consequence is soon told. The native chiefs, 
surprised at their own success, and unused to give 
or receive quarter on the field, slaughtered the 



230 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

prisoners with their tomahawks. Nineteen victims 
have been buried on the field of action.' 

Colonel Wakefield shortly afterwards wrote : c For 
myself, having been four years here and having fought 
an uphill game with some success, I should be glad 
to finish my work and see the settlement established 
prosperously, but the loss of poor Arthur and the 
disgusting opposition of the Government, which has 
led to it, have nearly upset me, and incline me to 
go home myself.' In fact, Admiral Fitzroy upon 
his arrival found British prestige drooping, and it is 
only just to admit that he had not the material 
force which would have enabled him to revive it. 
But he need not have trailed it in the dust. He 
sought an interview with the revolted chiefs, told them 
that the English were in the wrong, and that he should 
not endeavour to avenge their deaths, gently blamed 
the savages for having massacred their prisoners in 
cold blood, and concluded by exhorting all and sundry 
to live in peace for the future. Rauparaha very 
naturally observed next day that l the man had been 
talking a great lot of nonsense to him, but it was 
all lies, and that, in fact, he was afraid of him.' Such 
was indeed the fact. Admiral Fitzroy, afterwards 
renowned as a meteorologist, had been a man of 
mettle and a famous circumnavigator, and although 
Lord Stanley courageously pronounced his conduct 
not only wise but bold also, he must have been 
entirely unnerved by a sense of responsibility. 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 231 

The consequences were soon manifest. In the 
following year Heke, a powerful chief of the 
Northern Island, entered the town of Kororareka 
(newly christened Russell) and cut down the staff 
which displayed the British flag. Encouraged by 
Fitzroy's vacillation, he again invaded the settlement, 
and this time plundered and burned it, the inhabitants 
escaping on board ships in the bay. An assault upon 
his fortified pah failed, and British prestige disappeared 
for the time being. Fitzroy's finance had been as 
unsuccessful as his fighting. He issued ^15,000 in 
Government promissory notes, and, finding that no- 
body would take them, declared them legal tender. 
Money could not be raised at fifteen per cent. Lord 
Stanley's tracassertes had compelled the Company to 
suspend its operations, to the ruin of the labourers 
and others dependent upon it, and the colony's con- 
dition seemed hopeless when, in November 1845, 
Fitzroy was replaced by Sir George Grey, the saviour 
of South Australia. The Home Government, now 
thoroughly alarmed, gave Grey more support than 
they had accorded to Fitzroy. Something, too, he 
owed to good fortune, but in the main it was his 
energy and wisdom which restored peace and solvency 
within a year. 

Grey's appointment marks a new era in New 
Zealand history. When, after an enforced with- 
drawal for a season, Wakefield returned to New 
Zealand politics, it was to act upon another stage. 



232 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

During 1842 and 1843 ms attention, as we have 
seen, had been largely engrossed by the affairs of 
Canada. The Wairau massacre brought him back, 
and the next three years, the most laborious of his 
life, tried him until, he said, it made him dizzy to 
look at New Zealand House. In the next chapter, 
mainly devoted to his activity as an organiser behind 
the scenes, we shall have to describe his contest with 
the Colonial Office in the Parliamentary Committee 
of 1844, and in the great debate of 1845. At the 
end of this year Lord Stanley's retirement brought 
Mr Gladstone to the Colonial Secretaryship, and 
Wakefield saw a chance. ' Deeming Mr Gladstone 
perfectly able to seize, and not likely to despise, the 
opportunity of establishing in one instance a system 
of colonization and Colonial Government that might 
serve as a model for the reform of other colonies 
and for after time, I submitted to him by letter a 
plan for the settlement of New Zealand affairs, but 
too late for enabling him to come to any official 
decision upon it.' By so doing, as Wakefield believed, 
but most erroneously, if Sir Henry Taylor is justified 
in crediting the Minister with 'more freedom from 
littlenesses of feeling than I have met with before 
in any public man,' he gave mortal offence to Mr 
Gladstone's successor, Earl Grey, who had recently 
rendered the New Zealand Company much service, 
but all of a sudden 'seemed incapable of deciding 
officially any one of the points which, out of office, 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 233 

he had so lately and so completely determined in his 
own mind.' An interview between Wakefield and 
the Earl gave no satisfaction to either. Wakefield, 
whose health had shown signs of succumbing to ex- 
cessive toil in the autumn of 1844, at the time could 
hardly stand or speak from illness. A few days after- 
wards his long-overtaxed physical and mental powers 
forsook him. On 18th August 1846, walking in the 
Strand, he was struck down by paralysis of the brain, 
and his life was probably saved by the presence of 
Charles Allom, who refused to allow him to be bled. 
Nursed by his faithful friend, Mrs Allom, he long lay 
suspended between life and death. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE TRANSPORTATION COMMITTEE THE COLONIAL 

LANDS COMMITTEE— THE NEW ZEALAND COM- 
MITTEES OF 184O AND 1844 THE NEW ZEALAND 

COMPANY AND LORD STANLEY DEBATES IN THE 

COMMONS WAKEFIELD AND ADAM SMITH 

POLITICS FOR THE PEOPLE 

It is asserted by psychologists, and the assertion ad- 
mits of confirmation from the experience of every 
reflecting man, that the absolute stock of knowledge, 
thought and emotion of which we are conscious 
bears but a small proportion to the stores latent in the 
mind in a sub-conscious condition, but ready to be 
called into activity at any moment by the application 
of the proper stimulus. It is equally true of the 
brain of the State, that the visible is but little in 
comparison with the invisible energy, that conspicuous 
events are commonly but the outcome of long, slow, 
and subterranean processes. Especially is this the 
case with reforms prepared by the agency of Parlia- 
mentary Committees, whose function is frequently 
that of mere publication. The visible proceedings 

234 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 235 

of such Committees, we may be sure, bear hardly 
a larger proportion to the invisible forces which 
have set their machinery in motion than does the 
limited domain of fully conscious mind to the dim 
infinitude of unconscious cerebration. All the labour 
of Edward Gibbon Wakefield of which it is possible 
to take cognisance would probably appear insignifi- 
cant in comparison with his exertions in originating, 
organising, coaching, cramming, sometimes, perhaps, 
coaxing or mystifying the various Parliamentary 
Committees convened to further his projects, or whose 
interference with these he had to avert. 

Wakefield's activity as a Parliamentary engineer 
followed the same development as his activity as a 
writer and a promoter of companies ; it began with 
gaols and ended with colonies. The transition was 
effected through the then prevailing system of trans- 
portation, a subject equally important to the reformer 
of prisons at home and to the emigrant to distant 
settlements. 

It is a sufficient refutation of Machiavelli's and 
Bentham's systems of ethics, that they cannot be 
applied where they are least exceptionable in point 
of morality, and most palpably useful to the com- 
munity. No one, unless when demonstrably incor- 
rigible offenders were in question, ever proposed to 
extinguish crime by extinguishing criminals, although 
such a measure would be far less shocking to moral 
feeling than the sacrifice of the innocent for reasons 



236 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

of State, and nothing could more effectually promote 
'the greatest happiness of the greatest number.' 
Transportation is undoubtedly the next remedy in 
point of effectiveness, and the existence of antipodal 
regions where criminals could be isolated from the 
sound part of the community must have at first 
seemed an absolute godsend. Bv and by the system 
appeared liable to grievous objections, a large propor- 
tion of which, however, did not concern Wakefield 
as a Builder of Greater Britain. The foundation of 
a penal settlement on the island of Ascension, for 
example, might be deplorable on many accounts, and 
especially detrimental to the interests of the Corpora- 
tion of London, but would blight no rising nation. 
It was far otherwise when England took to rearing 
future empires on a substratum of convictism, and 
rendering the fair parts of the earth which she had 
occupied as trustee for her own surplus population 
uninhabitable by decent citizens. The state of 
affairs which thus grew up in New South Wales, 
divided between a small and grasping set of tyrannical 
officials, a middle class of 'emancipists,' or liberated 
convicts, from which servants or shopkeepers were 
chiefly recruited, a sprinkling of honest settlers, con- 
sidered, Darwin says, by the emancipists as inter- 
lopers, and a labouring class of convicts serving out 
their sentences, may be read in Bennett's History of 
Australian Discovery and Colonization. No healthy 
element could be infused into a society of pardoned 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 237 

felons, where the Attorney-General's own clerk was 
an ex-convict : it was not until 1818 that two persons 
found their way to the colony as free passengers 
paying their own passage. Here was something for 
a colonial reformer to protest against, and Wakefield 
was early in the field, here as elsewhere in advance 
of his time, for the free colonists themselves, looking 
merely to cheapness of labour, and not perceiving the 
rottenness which they were introducing into the 
social fabric, were for a long time passionate advocates 
of deportation. Even Darwin, while admitting that 
any moral reform was out of the question, thought 
that the system had succeeded in 'making men out- 
wardly honest, and thus giving birth to a rich and 
splendid country.' x Yet he sums up, c Nothing but 
rather sharp necessity should compel me to emigrate.' 
Wakefield discussed the subject, though not very 
profoundly from the point of view of colonial interests, 
in his Letter from Sydney, and from that of English 
prison discipline, in his essay on The Punishment of 
Death. The small band of colonial reformers with 
whom he was associated thought with him, and at 
their instance it was especially enacted that no depor- 
tation of convicts should ever take place to their 

1 These epithets seem discordant with Darwin's generally unfavourable 
impression of Australia. One remark he makes is curious ; he says that 
wool cannot be profitably transported for any considerable distance on 
account of the unfitness of the country for canals. Yet the Liverpool 
and Manchester Railway had been opened for more than a year before 
he left England. 



238 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

pattern colony of South Australia. Wakefield's first 
appearance before any Parliamentary Committee was 
in 1831, when he gave evidence, repeating and empha- 
sising some of the most remarkable passages in his 
Punishment of Death, before the Committee of the 
Commons on Secondary Punishments. It was not 
until 1837 that he was able to organise the memorable 
inquiry which gave transportation a mortal blow. 

It may appear strange to find this Committee 
cited as an instance of Wakefield's beneficent activity 
as a colonial reformer, for although his hand may be 
traced in its recommendations on the sale of land and 
the encouragement of immigration, his name seems 
not to occur anywhere in its two folio volumes of 
report, testimony, and appendices. There can be no 
stronger illustration of the frequently subterranean 
character of the most profitable political activity, for 
Thornton Hunt wrote truly in his obituary notice of 
Wakefield in the Daily Telegraph : — 

' He had gained the active aid of several men 
in Parliament, and in Sir William Molesworth the 
colonial reformer found a mover and a chairman 
for the Committee on Convict Transportation 
which followed up Ward's. 1 Before that tribunal, 
by one means or other, Wakefield managed to bring 
such a mass of appalling evidence that it became 
impossible to sustain the system, which was in a few 
years abolished.' 

1 On colonial lands, also engineered by Wakefield. 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 239 

Sir William Molesworth had already assailed trans- 
portation in the first number of the London and 
Westminster Review. A stronger Committee than 
that presided over by him can seldom have met. It 
included both the leaders of the House, Lord John 
Russell and Sir Robert Peel ; Lord Howick and Sir 
George Grey ; and Messrs Ward, Hawes, and Charles 
Buller. Sir William Molesworth's part in colonial 
affairs now and long afterwards was so important that 
his character demands a special notice, but it is not one 
easy to depict. In the pages of Mrs Grote, for years 
his intimate friend, and, notwithstanding their ultimate 
estrangement, far above any suspicion of malice, he 
appears a wayward and indocile being. His political 
opponents, on the other hand, thought him heavy and 
slow, a mere absorber of blue-books. The fact appears 
to be that the vehemence of his temper was at variance 
with the deliberation of his intellectual processes ; and 
that the vigour of his action, when it came, seemed 
the more startling from the torpidity which had pre- 
ceded it. Devoid of imagination or intuition, he was 
compelled to rely solely upon his very considerable 
logical faculty, but the certainty of being right which 
he thus acquired rendered him more absolute and 
imperious than the quicker minds which have not 
stopped to verify every step of their course. Morally, 
notwithstanding the unevennesses of his temper, he 
was one of the noblest of men. His solid worth and 
serious aims, steady perseverance in investigation and 



240 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

thorough moral and intellectual honesty are lovingly 
set forth in the autobiography of his friend, H. F. 
Chorley, in a passage the more worthy of notice as it 
has escaped Mr Leslie Stephen in the Dictionary of 
National Biography. Such characteristics well qualified 
him for the important task which, at Wakefield's 
instigation, he now (1837) undertook. 

The searching nature of the Committee's investiga- 
tions is evinced by the fact that, although no more 
than twenty-three witnesses were examined, their 
evidence occupies four hundred and fifty pages folio. 
The appendices of documents comprise between seven 
and eight hundred pages. The witnesses included 
official persons like the Chief Justice of New South 
Wales, who had himself gone out in a convict ship for 
want of another ; Sir George Arthur, formerly Lieu- 
tenant Governor of Van Diemen's Land ; Mr 
Macarthur, son of the man who had created the 
wealth of New South Wales by the introduction of 
merino sheep ; Major Wright, ex-police magistrate ; 
and Peter Murdock, ex-superintendent of convicts. 
There was also representative colonists like Dr Lang, 
ministers of religion like Dr Ullathorne, afterwards 
Roman Catholic Bishop of Birmingham, and super- 
intendents of emigration like Mr John Marshall. 
The appendices are crammed with essays, despatches, 
reports, petitions, complaints of the scarcity of labour, 
controversies respecting the charge of Mr Justice 
Burton, who had frankly told the community that 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 241 

* the main business of them all was the commission of 
crime or the punishment of it,' and statistics of all 
kinds down to the number of lashes inflicted by * the 
standard scourging-cat.' Evidence and appendices 
alike teem with details of ill-doing, from the atrocity 
of the man Pearce, who not only killed the man Cox 
but ate him, down to the misdemeanour of Mrs 
Murdock's convict servant, who c was found lying on 
the bed with what she called the yard of clay in her 
mouth, and drinking a pot of porter, and blowing a 
cloud ; that was her expression to Mrs Murdock.' 
On the whole, a more uninviting picture was probably 
never traced of any society : ' as the greater portion 
of the agricultural labourers,' Sir William Molesworth 
quaintly remarked in his report, 'belong to the 
criminal population, they constitute a peasantry unlike 
any other in the world.' The statistics adduced 
established, as he showed, that the number of convic- 
tions for highway robbery in New South Wales, in 
proportion to the population, exceeded the total number 
of convictions for all offences in England : that rapes, 
murders and attempted murders were proportionately 
as frequent there as petty larcenies here ; that if the 
annual average of convictions in England had been 
137,000 instead of 17,000, then, and not till then, the 
state of crime and punishment in the two countries 
would have been the same. How could such a 
condition of things be tolerated ? The answer re- 
peated the contention of Wakefield's Letter from 

Q 



242 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

Sydney ; he had pointed out that, owing to the great 
dispersion of working people and the facility of pro- 
curing land, no labour but convict labour was to be 
had ; and it now appeared that such labour was so 
indispensable that the colonists were nearly unanimous 
in resisting any interference with a system which 
embittered their lives and contaminated their offspring. 
The Committee, however, were entirely unanimous in 
condemning it. Under the guidance of Sir William 
Molesworth, whose report is a model of exhaustive 
discussion, they resolved that Australia should no longer 
be polluted for the convenience of the mother country. 
They recommended the discontinuance of transporta- 
tion except to distant depots, and- sought to cure the 
scarcity of labour by an immigration fund obtained by 
raising the price of land in accordance with Wake- 
field's principles, the only reward he could expect or 
receive for his unrecognised labour. 

In estimating the credit due to Wakefield, Moles- 
worth and their associates in the abolition of transport- 
ation, it must be remembered that they were not the 
mouthpieces of a popular demand, but were forcing 
reform upon unwilling colonists, as well as upon an 
unwilling Government. A meeting held at Hobart 
Town to protest against convict deportation ' was 
respectable, but not numerous ; ' and the material 
interests of the mother country appeared at first sight 
still more contrary to any change. Many of us can 
remember the consternation occasioned when c ticket- 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 243 

of- leave' and 'garotter' became household words 
among us from the retention of the convict element 
at home. Obliged, however, to choose between safety 
within the four seas and the weal of her colonial 
empire, Britain has made the right choice, for which 
she may largely thank Wakefield, Molesworth, and an 
illustrious man who had taken up the subject from 
another point of view, Archbishop Whately. 

The Transportation Committee had been preceded 
in the previous session (1836) by one of no less 
importance upon colonial lands, equally Wakefield's 
creation, and in whose proceedings he took a pro- 
minent instead of an inconspicuous part. - The object 
was to obtain the sanction of the cardinal principles of 
the Wakefield system, that land should be sold by 
contract at a sufficient price, instead of being given 
away or leased at a nominal quit rent, and that the 
proceeds should be employed in promoting immigration. 
The former principle had indeed been established by 
Lord Goderich's New South Wales regulations of 183 1, 
but the price of five shillings an acre thus imposed 
was, in Wakefield's opinion, as already stated, far too 
low. It was now proposed, in the words of the report 
of the Committee, drafted by its able chairman, Mr 
H. G. Ward, 'that the whole of the arrangements 
connected with the sale of land should be placed under 
the charge of a central Land Board, resident in 
London.' This was carried in Committee, but ob- 
structed by the Government, whose representative, Sir 



244- BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

George Grey, Colonial Under Secretary (not to be 
confounded with the Governor of South Australia and 
New Zealand), voted steadily against all the specific- 
ally Wakefieldian clauses of the Report. Land Com- 
missioners, however, were ultimately appointed by 
Lord John Russell, but only as an appendage to the 
Colonial Office. The evidence collected was of the 
highest value, conveying the opinions of such authori- 
ties as Wakefield, Torrens, Hanson and Poulett 
Scrope. The inquiry was also of great personal 
advantage to Wakefield, bringing him into connection 
with many members of the House of Commons ; 
familiarising the public with his name, hitherto so 
much in the background ; and exhibiting him as a 
powerful reasoner on his feet, no less than in his study. 
He was severely cross-examined by Roebuck, who was 
hardly capable of forming a serious opinion upon an 
economical question, but whose French Canadian 
clients dreaded the application of the Wakefield 
system to Lower Canada. Wakefield, however, felt 
that the tide was with him, and thus concluded the 
remarkable passage in his evidence, already referred to, 
upon New Zealand and other fields yet open to the 
colonizing energy of Britain : — 

* These, I know, may be considered as something 
like dreams ; but if they be so, I shall have the 
consolation of knowing that the plan of fixing a 
price upon all lands, and employing the purchase 
money as an immigration fund, which was described 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 245 

to the Committee the other day by the Honourable 
Member for Devonport as the only plan which any 
reasonable person would now think of adopting, 
was, not six years, not five years ago, I think I 
may say not three years ago, treated with derision 
and scorn by those who had the means of carrying 
it into full effect.' 

Before passing on to the two great New Zealand 
Committees of 1840 and 1844 it will be convenient 
to deal briefly with the South Australian Committee 
of 1840, already mentioned. This did not immedi- 
ately concern Wakefield, as the inquiry principally 
respected the proceedings of the South Australian 
Commissioners, with whom he had no official con- 
nection, and the alarming financial condition of the 
colony, for which he was in no way responsible. 
He nevertheless gave important evidence, advocating 
a stricter application of his system to the organisation 
of the colony, and the appendix of documents con- 
tains one of the most remarkable papers he ever 
wrote, his letter of the 2d June 1835 to the South 
Australian Commissioners, from which large quota- 
tions have already been made. The result of the 
inquiry was entirely favourable to his views, the 
Committee reporting : — 

' Your Committee conceive that the first principle 
of the system of colonization originally recommended 
by Mr Wakefield (to realise which was the object 
of founding the colony of South Australia) is that 



246 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

of maintaining a due proportion between the extent 
of land which is appropriated and the population by 
which it is occupied, by imposing such a price upon 
land as shall prevent its being bought until the 
number of its inhabitants is sufficient to make use 
of to advantage. Your Committee, persuaded by 
the soundness of this principle, consider the fact 
stated by Colonel Gawler to be conclusive as to the 
inadequacy of the price hitherto imposed upon land 
in South Australia, since the appropriation of so 
much greater an extent of land than is required to 
supply the wants of the inhabitants is altogether 
inconsistent with the attainment of the object justly 
considered of paramount importance by Mr Wake- 
field, that, namely of rendering the industry of the 
colonists as productive as possible, by maintaining 
in a newly settled colony the same system of com- 
bination of labour and division of employments 
which prevails in older societies. Hence an increase 
in the price of land in South Australia seems to 
your Committee to be necessary, in order to give 
effect to the principle upon which the colony was 
established.' 

The New Zealand Committee of 1840 brought 
out a full statement of the case between the New 
Zealand Company and its various opponents. Here 
Wakefield was the most conspicuous figure, and his 
evidence teems with interest as regards the state 
of the country before settlement, the proceedings 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 247 

of the company, its relations with the Government, 
the reserves of land for the benefit of the natives, 
the provisions for religion and education, the question 
of auction sales of land, the French expedition, and 
almost every point that could be raised. His asser- 
tions respecting the support originally promised to 
the company by Lord Howick led to a remarkable 
scene, thus described in his Art of Colonization : — 

' I was examined for several days, Lord Howick 
not being present. When my examination was 
closed he attended the Committee for the first time, 
and complained of certain statements made by me 
as a witness, which he declared to be untrue. At 
his instance a day was fixed when I was to attend 
the Committee for the single purpose of being cross- 
examined by him, and destroyed if he made his 
charges good. When we met in the committee 
room, it contained, besides a full attendance of 
members of the Committee, other members of the 
House, who came there to witness the anticipated 
conflict. But hardly any conflict took place. Lord 
Howick, after arranging on the table a formidable 
mass of notes and documents, put some questions 
to me with a view of establishing one of his 
accusations. The answers established that I had 
spoken the exact truth, and that my accuser him- 
self was mistaken. Instead of proceeding to another 
charge, he hastily gathered up his papers and left 
the room without a remark. The Committee's 



248 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

blue-book reports the words that passed : if it also 
described the scene you would probably, upon reading 
it, agree with the lookers-on that in this murderous 
attack upon me Lord Howick was provokingly 
worsted.' 

The scene, in truth, can in nowise be reproduced 
from the Report. Blue-books do not often stir as 
with the sound of a trumpet, but often would if 
tone and manner could be reproduced as well as 
language. It is to Lord Howick's honour that he 
attended a dinner given by the New Zealand 
Company to Wakefield in the following year, and 
was friendly to the Company as long as he remained 
in opposition. Whether the air of Downing Street, or, 
as Wakefield thought, jealousy of Mr Gladstone, sub- 
sequently biased him to a different course, cannot be 
determined. Mr Gladstone, it should be noted, was 
a member of the Committee of 1840, and had it 
depended upon him, its proceedings would not have 
been abortive. He voted for the statesmanlike draft 
report of the chairman, Lord Eliot, which the majority 
shelved without putting anything into its place. 
Lord Eliot proposed that New Zealand should be 
made an independent colony, and, agreeing that all 
unoccupied land should be vested in the Crown, 
and that the Crown should have the right of pre- 
emption over all land actually possessed by the 
natives, recommended that the Company should retain 
land equal in value to the amount expended by it 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 249 

in colonization, and that until a settled revenue could 
be obtained, the funds necessary for State purposes 
should be advanced by it upon loan. Commissioners, 
' wholly unconnected with New Zealand and New 
South Wales, and having no pecuniary interests in 
either colony,' were to be appointed by the Crown 
to regulate all questions. Crown land was to be sold 
by contract at a uniform price of not less than a 
pound an acre, and the proceeds were to be employed 
as an immigration fund for conveying labouring 
emigrants to the colony. This would have been a 
nearly ideal system of colonization, but the majority 
of the Committee elected to leave things as they 
were. Lord John Russell, then Colonial Secretary, 
was considerably influenced by Lord Eliot's abortive 
report, and not only approximated to the directors, 
as already related, but accepted a dinner from 
them. All seemed going well, when, to employ 
Carlyle's metaphor, the New Zealand minnow's 
little creek was perturbed by an oceanic catas- 
trophe in the British Parliament. Lord John Russell 
went out, Lord Stanley came in, and war be- 
tween the Government and the Company broke 
out anew. 

It is not easy to determine why Lord Stanley should 
have thought it needful to undo his predecessor's work. 
He was the last man to be unduly deferential to 
missionaries. The company imputed all the 'large 
blue flies' of the Colonial Office to Sir James 



250 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

Stephen ; but Stanley was not Glenelg, nor Stephen's 
influence what it had been under that amiable noble- 
man. None ought to question Stanley's honesty of 
purpose : the probability is that he really discerned 
nothing beyond the purview of an ordinary Treasury 
clerk, and never suspected that this wolf of a 
Company was nursing an empire. 

It must in justice to the Government be remem- 
bered that their patience had been severely strained by 
the extravagance of successive Governors of New 
South Wales, who had among them incurred two or 
three millions of liabilities with little visible return. 
This could not, however, justify the hostile tone 
towards the Company which Stanley assumed from 
the first, and his virtual repudiation of the engage- 
ments of his predecessor. In February 1843 ^ e 
committed himself unreservedly to the Treaty of 
Waitangi, which was one of the leading questions for 
the great Parliamentary Committee of the following 
year. In May 1843, however, he came to an arrange- 
ment which allowed of the resumption of its suspended 
land sales, but they were again suspended in February 
1844. On 26th April, Wakefield wrote to his sister : — 

'Yesterday the New Zealand Company's proprietors 
learned all the truth about their affairs, which is a 
great relief to me. We declared war to the knife 
with the Colonial Office ; and last night the House of 
Commons, on Aglionby's motion, appointed a select 
Committee to inquire into the whole subject.' 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 251 

This Committee engendered one of the most for- 
midable Blue Books ever produced as regards weight 
and size, although its contents are frequently highly 
interesting and readable. c You may guess,' says 
Wakefield to his sister, c how busy I have been when 
I tell you that our evidence appended to the Report 
occupies 800 or 900 pages of print.' Between minutes 
of testimony and documents, the number of pages is 
in fact exactly a thousand. The documents include 
Colonel Wakefield's reports of his voyages and pur- 
chases, embodying a vast store of miscellaneous 
observations ; Dr DiefFenbach's reports on natural 
history ; Colonel Wakefield's correspondence with 
various governors, lieutenant governors, commissioners 
of lands, and natives' protectors ; his despatches home 
setting forth the afflictions he underwent from these 
personages ; the whole history of the Wairau massacre 
and of Captain Fitzroy's condonation of it ; the 
accounts of the company ; and the highly controver- 
sial correspondence between their chairman and Lord 
Stanley and his under secretary. It will be remarked 
that scarcely any important document on the Com- 
pany's side is dated at a time when Wakefield was out 
of England ; his name, nevertheless, occurs only 
twice, as the father of Edward Jerningham Wakefield 
and as one of the recipients of an official letter of 
condolence on the death of Arthur Wakefield. The 
evidence, less voluminous than the appendices, abounds 
in details respecting the purchases of the Company, 



252 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

the natives' notions of landed and other property, and 
their relations with Europeans in general. From this 
the Committee had to elicit, if it could, a judgment 
on the past transactions, a policy for the future admin- 
istration of the islands, and a decision whether the 
Company was entitled to claim performance of the 
agreement entered into with Lord John Russell, and 
thwarted by his successor. Although ten out of fifteen 
members of the Committee were of Lord Stanley's 
political party, the result was a brilliant but barren 
victory for the Company, accurately described in two 
letters from Wakefield. The first, written on the very 
day (9th July 1844) of the passing of the resolutions 
on which the Committee's report was founded, is 
addressed to his brother-in-law from the House of 
Commons : — 

'The resolutions have all passed, after a desperate 
fight, together with one proposed by Lord F. Egerton 
speaking in the handsomest terms of poor Arthur. 
The Report, to be based upon these resolutions, will be 
drawn by Lord Howick, and presented to the Com- 
mittee in a fortnight. There is no doubt of its passing.' 

A second letter, to his sister, is dated 4th July, but 
there must be some error : — 

c As London secrets are very safe at Stoke, I write to 
tell you that we know what the Report of the Com- 
mittee of the House of Commons will be, having seen 
a draft of it. It goes to exculpate us and condemn 
the Colonial Office upon almost every point of 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 253 

difference, and will be, I think, a complete exculpation 
of poor Arthur's memory, and of William's and my 
boy's conduct throughout. This concerns ourselves 
and might [should] not have been mentioned first. As 
to the Company, and what I care more about, the 
colony, measures will be recommended for putting all 
to rights without delay. I expect the Report will be 
carried by a large majority in the Committee, includ- 
ing the chairman (Lord Howick, who drew it), Lord 
Francis Egerton, Sir John Hanmer, Mr Clive and 
other respectable Tories. What Hope and Stanley 
and Stephen are to do is their affair. Fitzroy must, I 
think, resign ; and the animals who governed in 
Hobson's name, and afterwards with Shortland, will be 
sent about their business. This is not a too sanguine 
account.' 

Wakefield was here, as often, over sanguine ; he 
seemed, nevertheless, to have sound reasons for his 
confidence. Lord Howick's report was carried as he 
predicted, and as proceeding from an old antagonist of 
the New Zealand Company, and approved by a Com- 
mittee neither packed in its interest nor engineered by 
its managers except for the manoeuvring necessary to 
get Lord Howick into the chair, it ought to have 
settled the question. It is an exceedingly able 
document, forcibly pointing out the mischief of the 
antagonism between the Crown and the Company 
which had existed from the first, though of course not 
admitting that Lord Howick himself and his col- 



254 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

leagues were its chief authors, and even blaming the 
Company for the happy audacity which had preserved 
New Zealand to Britain. Coming, however, to the 
root of all actual difficulties, the indiscriminate 
recognition of native titles to land under the Treaty 
of Waitangi, Lord Howick points out that the lands 
held collectively, of which the possession was guar- 
anteed to the original inhabitants of New Zealand, 
must have been regarded as the lands actually occu- 
pied by them, 'which would have removed from 
the field of discussion by far the greater part of 
the lands purchased by the Company. If native 
rights to the ownership of land had been admitted 
only when arising from occupation, there would 
have been no difficulty in giving at once to the settlers 
secure and quiet possession of the land they required, 
and they would thus have been able to begin without 
delay and in earnest the work of reclaiming the 
unoccupied soil.' Instead of this, they had been 
harassed by commissioners and lawsuits and a hydra 
growth of native claims which it was fondly deemed 
had been extinguished, and the majority were yet 
without valid titles. Practical remedies were proposed 
for healing this state of things, and the claim of the 
Company under the agreement made in November 
1840 with Lord John Russell, under which the 
Company was to receive four acres for every pound it 
had expended, 'without reference to the validity, or 
otherwise, of its supposed purchases from the natives,' 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 255 

was fully upheld. That this was the view of Lord 
John Russell himself is clear from a letter of his in 
the appendix addressed to the Governor of the Com- 
pany, and dated 29th June 1844 : — 

4 1 believed the extent of land which it would be in 
the power of the Crown to grant to be far greater 
than would be enough to satisfy its engagements. I 
did not suppose that any claim could be set up by the 
natives to the millions of acres of land which are to 
be found in New Zealand neither occupied nor 
cultivated, nor in any fair sense owned by any in- 
dividual. I believed, therefore, that in any case the 
Crown could fulfil its promise ; and that when so 
many pounds had been proved to have been expended 
by the Company for purposes named in the agreement, 
the Crown would be able to grant to the Company 
four acres of land for each pound so expended.' 

Lord Stanley, however, had no notion of giving in, 
and his despatches to New Zealand were of a nature 
to practically nullify the decision of the Committee. 
Much friction consequently arose. Wakefield tells 
his sister in an undated letter, which must have been 
written about this time : — 

c The New Zealand war waxes fiercer every week. 
The correspondence with Lord Stanley has now got 
to a ludicrous pitch of Billingsgate on both sides. 
Cheat, liar, fool are not common words in the letters, 
but express ideas commonly found there. There is 
little to choose between the parties as to fierceness, 



256 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

but we have the great advantage of having truth on 
our side. The correspondence rolls the proud Stanley 
in the dirt, and how he will ever bring himself to let 
the public see it passes my comprehension. His part 
in it is a series of tricks and falsehoods which our part 
remorselessly exposes. Lord John Russell, who is a 
most important witness in the cause, agrees with us 
on main points. I rely on the justice of the Prime 
Minister, to whom we shall probably be compelled 
to appeal.' 

It is indeed likely that if Sir Robert Peel could 
have had his own way a settlement would have been 
arrived at. He always treated the question with 
becoming reserve and moderation, and disapproved of 
the Treaty of Waitangi, which had been ratified 
when he was out of office. He could not openly 
overrule so important a colleague as Stanley, but it 
was probably owing to his influence, augmented by 
the general tone of a debate raised by Charles Buller 
in March 1845, that Government for awhile seemed 
inclined to come to terms : — 

' The recent debates about New Zealand,' Wake- 
field writes to his sister on 23d March, ' have had the 
desired effect ; the Government, not Lord Stanley 
alone, but his principal colleagues, with his consent, 
having made us an overture of reconciliation. We 
have said "Yes" on the understanding that we are 
not to patch up the old arrangement, which is too 
vague, and makes us too dependent on the goodwill 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 257 

of Government, but have a new one, which, subject 
to certain well-defined checks, shall render us inde- 
pendent. We require, in short, security for the future 
as well as indemnity for the past ; and the reply has 
been, " Very well ; it is best to make an effective and 
lasting arrangement whilst we are about it." The 
negotiation is now in full swing.' 

A scheme was, in fact, drawn out in private com- 
munications between Charles Buller and Sir James 
Graham, which failed from the opposition of Lord 
Stanley. Wakefield writes to his sister, apparently 
on 6th June : — 

'The negotiation is over and has not resulted in 
any agreement. Our proposal is rejected by Stanley ; 
and we have rejected an offer from him to pay off 
the shareholders of the Company. The whole must 
come out next week, and will have at least the effect 
of improving our position : since the Government 
have entertained the plan of handing over to us the 
sovereignty of New Zealand, and have offered the 
shareholders full compensation of their loss of ^300,000. 
I am better than might have been expected, and 
have been able to take all the part I wished in the 
negotiation and in rejecting the offer of the Govern- 
ment.' 

Nothing remained for the New Zealand Company 
but to bring their case before Parliament, though with 
the certainty of being outvoted. They had already, 
on 1 6th April, even while the negotiations with Lord 



258 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

Stanley were pending, presented an elaborate petition 
stating their grievances, and their case was now en- 
trusted to Charles Buller. Nothing but his premature 
death prevented this gifted man from taking a fore- 
most rank among the orators as well as the statesmen 
of his time. He had already, in 1843, delivered a 
great speech on colonization, not leading or intended 
to lead to a division, which may be found as an 
appendix to Wakefield's Art of Colonization, and his 
opening speech in the debate which commenced on 
17th June was worthy of his best powers. The 
special proposal made was that the House should 
resolve itself into a Committee to consider the case 
of the Company, which the Government chose to 
regard as a vote of censure on the Colonial Secretary. 
The result under such circumstances could not be 
doubtful, but, considering that the Government's 
normal majority was ninety, its reduction to fifty-one 
was a signal triumph for reason and justice. Stanley's 
fiery eloquence could not be heard ; he was safely 
bottled up in the House of Lords. It is easy to imagine 
him and Wakefield listening to the debate, each 
thinking how much better he himself could have con- 
ducted it, and chafing at the insuperable impediment 
that kept him dumb. Ellen Turner was indeed 
avenged ! Nevertheless, Wakefield's side had little 
reason for complaint. Sheil's eloquence was enlisted 
in their cause, but they derived more really valuable 
support from impartial and not altogether friendly 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 259 

speakers like Lord John Russell and Lord Howick. 
On the other side the official orators, Peel, Graham, 
Cardwell, while speaking with dignity and effect, 
indicated that they did not feel altogether comfortable 
in the position into which they had been dragged by 
the unruly Stanley. Nor could they well, the ques- 
tion being merely whether the Company, having un- 
deniably received a promise of four acres of land for 
every pound they had expended, should be forthwith 
endowed with them out of the waste unoccupied lands 
belonging to the Crown, the other party to the com- 
pact ; or whether a purely imaginary native right to 
these lands should be set up, ruinous to Company and 
settlers alike, and in no way advantageous to the 
natives, whose interests would have been much better 
consulted by a strict execution of the Company's 
original plan of reserves in their favour. But Peel 
was afraid of a native war. 

The Company showed their confidence in their 
case by publishing a full report of the debate, with 
no comment beyond a reprint of certain documents 
in an appendix. The arrival of alarming news from 
New Zealand gave Buller an opportunity of raising 
the question once again on 21st July, but he was 
defeated by a majority of sixty-six, a result fully antici- 
pated by Wakefield, who had written to his sister 
on 23d July : — 

c All my power of writing, and even thinking, is 
so thoroughly engaged by the New Zealand affairs 



260 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

that I really have been unable to write to you, nor 
can I say more than a few words now. We shall 
be beaten in the Commons by a larger majority than 
before, as Peel has staked his Government on the 
issue, and people would send New Zealand, not to 
mention all Polynesia, to the bottom of the sea 
rather than turn him out for such a cause. But 
Stanley is gradually ruining himself, and everybody 
says he will retire when things are quiet. We mean 
to fight to the last, even on our own stumps. I 
suffer from the excitement, and now talk of going 
abroad after the session for three months with 
Charles Buller. If I could keep out of business in 
England it would please me better, but of that I 
have no chance.' 

Wakefield's predictions were so far justified that 
Lord Stanley resigned the Colonial Secretaryship 
before the end of the year, ostensibly from his 
opposition to the Free Trade policy of Sir Robert 
Peel ; but Wakefield always asserted that resent- 
ment at his chief's lukewarmness in supporting his 
New Zealand policy had much to do with it. His 
successor was Mr Gladstone, no novice in colonial 
matters, but one who had served on many colonial 
committees, and had always displayed eminent fair- 
ness of mind. To him, in January 1846, Wakefield 
addressed an elaborate memoir, which marks the 
transition in his own activity from that of the 
advocate of a company to that of the framer of a 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 261 

constitution. After a vigorous sketch of the prevail- 
ing dissatisfaction through all such parts of the 
British Colonial Empire as had not obtained relief by 
rebellion, and a terse and just definition of the fount 
of all the special ills of New Zealand as consisting 
in the 'placing of colonization in one set of hands 
and leaving all the rest of government in another 
set,' aptly compared to 'a pair of legs directed by 
different volitions, which would inevitably try to go 
different ways, and thus come to a standstill,' he 
proposes that the Company should retire from the 
scene altogether after receiving compensation, and 
that the colony should be divided into different self- 
governing municipalities, the Governor's office being 
abolished. Native affairs within the boundaries of 
the municipalities were to be left to the regulation 
of the governments ; outside these precincts, to 
themselves. The scheme probably grew out of the 
negotiations then in progress for the foundation of 
the Otago settlement, and foreshadows the system 
of provincial governments which long prevailed in 
New Zealand. The plan is not put forward as the 
best conceivable, but as a substitute for the preferable 
scheme of administration by a chartered company, 
assumed to be now impracticable. It was shrewdly 
devised to enable the colonists to get rid of the 
Colonial Office, but seems to imply a more advanced 
condition than the New Zealand settlements had 
then attained. 



262 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

Few Secretaries of State have had more ability 
or more inclination than Mr Gladstone to deal in 
a statesmanlike manner with colonial affairs. Two 
rocks he might have struck upon ; his High Church 
sympathies, skilfully played upon by Wakefield in 
this very memoir, and his tendency to unwise parsi- 
mony. Could these have been repressed he might 
have done great things ; but Free Trade at the moment 
swallowed up every other question, and he probablv 
gave but little attention to New Zealand in his brief 
and troubled term of office, during which he was 
without a seat in Parliament. Wakefield's memoir, 
with other interesting documents, was published in 
a supplement to the Spectator of 6th June. A few 
days previously the disheartened Company had passed 
a resolution in favour of retiring altogether from 
the work of colonization. Two months afterwards 
as related above Wakefield was withdrawn from 
public affairs bv the sudden stroke of illness, and 
when, after a long interval, the paralysed brain 
regained capacity for business, he found himself 
confronted with a new Secretary, a new Governor, 
a new Parliament, and, most important of all, a new 
spirit in the Company itself. 

Mention may be made here of two minor writ- 
ings of Wakefield's which fall within his Committee 
period. One, an annotated edition of Adam Smith's 
Wealth of Nations, might have been of considerable 
importance if it had been completed, but only the 



EDWARD GIBBON" WAKEFIELD 263 

first volume, published in 1835, contains anv notes 
of interest. Subsequent volumes were published up 
to 1840 with Wakefield's name as editor, bat his 
engagements appear to have prevented his giving 
any serious attention to the book. The notes exhibit 
him as a sagacious rather than as a regularlv-trained 
thinker. c His practical conclusions,' says Mill, 
1 appear to me just and important ; but he is not 
equally happv in incorporating his valuable specula- 
tions with the results of previous thought.' The 
commentary is now perhaps chiefly important for 
its notices of subsequent discoveries and social muta- 
tions which mav tend to affect the conclusions of 
Smith, whose work, nevertheless, he says, ■ is not 
onlv the most valuable book in the science, but 
one more valuable than all the others put together.' 
In fact, in Mill's opinion, Wakefield's doctrines are 
sound corollaries from Smith, though Smith himself 
might not have admitted it. In addition to the 
objects which an editor of The JVealth of Nations 
might be expected to propose to himself, Wakefield 
has two others. c To warn the student against implicit 
faith in the doctrines of a science which yet wants 
a complete alphabet ; to show how imperfect that 
science is after all that has been done for it, and to 
indicate some questions of great moment concerning 
which next to nothing has been done. Secondlv, 
to apply the doctrines of Adam Smith and others 
to some new circumstances in the economical state 



264 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

of our own country. Urged by the belief that 
economical suffering has been caused by mis- 
government, we are proceeding to establish a 
virtual democracy. It is a grand but also a fearful 
experiment.' 

De Tocqueville's great work on Democracy in 
America had been published in the same year as 
that in which these words were written, 1835. 
Whether Wakefield had seen it or not is uncertain ; 
his reflections had evidently led him to the same 
conclusions. These are further expressed in a little 
volume, Popular Politics (1837), which may be 
commended to those who fancy that, because he 
wished the aristocracy to have their share in building 
up the Empire, he was therefore an aristocrat. It is 
on the contrary a manifesto of democratic principles, 
which might be termed violent and crude but for 
its evidently designed adaptation to untrained readers, 
in a style imitative of Cobbett. Most of the papers 
are reprints from previous publications then out of 
print. One of the most powerful is an account 
from personal observation of the horror excited by 
the introduction of ■ public executions into Dunkirk. 
In another, a judge is represented as addressing a 
criminal on the good turn he is doing him by 
sentencing him to transportation : ' For what you 
have done here, depend on it, you will not be 
punished ; if you abstain from crime in the colony, 
you will be richly rewarded for the crime which 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 265 

brought you before me, fortunate rascal that you 
are ! ' 

Wakefield's Radicalism, nevertheless, was of the 
opportunist order ; he. supported political reforms less 
on abstract grounds than as means to the ends de- 
fined in his election address to the people of Birming- 
ham as 'high wages and high profits, both together, 
with high rents at the same time, such productive 
industry as should yield plenty for the workmen, plenty 
for the master, and plenty for the landlord — not by 
fits occasionally interrupting the ordinary state of 
distress, but permanently, so as to ensure to all classes 
at all times the means of a happy existence.' 

Such was the creed of the man who has been 
held up to opprobrium as the tool of the aristocrat 
and the capitalist. But neither was he the instru- 
ment of the classes below them. He was fully as 
desirous that the landlord should obtain a fair rent 
as that the labourer should receive fair wages. 
Cobden and Bright denounced the selfishness of the 
land-owning class, an accusation retorted with equal 
vehemence upon the manufacturers. In Wakefield, 
and almost in Wakefield alone, except for Carlyle, 
whom he never mentions, we find perfect fairness 
to every class, and equal zeal for the well-being of 
all : an object which he thought, and Carlyle 
thought with him, easy of attainment, if due 
advantage were taken of the opportunities provided 
by the expansion of our Colonial Empire. There 



266 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

was no feature in his programme which the Con- 
servatives could not take up as well as the Radicals, 
and when after a while the Conservatives did in a 
measure take it up, they took up the Radical 
candidate for Birmingham along with it. 



CHAPTER X 

THE LAST DAYS OF THE NEW ZEALAND COMPANY 

JOHN ROBERT GODLEY SIR GEORGE GREY's AD- 
MINISTRATION DEATH OF COLONEL WAKEFIELD 

< THE ART OF COLONIZATION '—CRITICISM OF 

M. LEROY-BEAULIEU DEATH OF CHARLES BULLER 

Speaking before the New Zealand Legislative 
Assembly, Wakefield condensed his views as to the 
decline and fall of the New Zealand Company into 
an epigram, ' The Company was founded by men 
with great souls and little pockets, and fell into 
the hands of men with great pockets and little 
souls.' Such was certainly the fact, yet it does 
not necessarily imply any severe censure upon the 
managers under whose direction the Company ex- 
pired. In all great movements that comprise both 
an ideal and a practical side, there must of necessity 
be both enthusiasts and men of the world, and the 
influence of the former will be more potent in the 
early stages of the movement, because the initial 
impetus has come from them. As they drop off, they 

267 



268 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

will usually be replaced by men of a less exalted, not 
necessarily a less respectable type. Never, perhaps, 
was any association dealing with scrip and shares 
launched in a spirit of purer enthusiasm than the 
New Zealand Company. It had not, as will be re- 
collected, been intended by its promoters to have been 
a joint stock company, but this character had been 
forced upon it by the perversity of Government. 

The condescension to joint stock enterprise was 
ill-omened from the first, the names of the Company's 
first directors manifest a declension from the board 
of the original association. Nothing can be said 
against Mr Joseph Somes, but the accession of this 
great shipowner to Lord Durham's chair indicated 
that the mercantile element was prevailing over 
that of abstract enthusiasm for sound principles of 
colonization. Nor can the solid business men into 
whose hands the undertaking was lapsing be censured 
if they took a serious view of their duties to their 
shareholders, and lamented, though they did not 
seek to evade, the necessity for relinquishing their 
own salaries, and cutting down those of their staff 
by fifty per cent. A note of dissonance may perhaps 
be detected in Wakefield's letter to his sister in 
1845, already quoted, where he speaks of 'the Com- 
pany, and, what I care more for, the colony." 
Superior ability, and the fact that he was the only 
director able to devote his whole time to the com- 
pany, kept him at the head of affairs until his 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 269 

breakdown in August 1846, after which date no 
responsibility for any of its doings can be imputed 
to him. From that moment a complete change in 
the Company's policy is observable. c My incapacity,' 
Wakefield told the New Zealand Committee in 1854, 
c changed the whole character of the direction, which 
then fell into the hands of a few persons in whose 
minds sound principles of colonization and colonial 
government were as nothing compared with pounds, 
shillings and pence. They sold the honour of the 
Company and the interests of the colony for money, 
to come through a parliamentary obligation upon 
New Zealand to recompense the Company for its 
losses.' Here speaks the enthusiast, to whom profits 
are nothing in comparison with principles, but, while 
we admire, we must admit that the director who 
thinks of the interests of the shareholder has also 
a case. The worst of the new regime was that 
under it the Company became wholly inoperative, 
it served neither God nor Mammon. The arrange- 
ment so much decried by Wakefield was concluded 
in May 1847, anc ^ though Wakefield always asserted 
that it was forced upon Charles Buller, must have 
in some measure commended itself to his judgment, 
seeing that he prepared it himself. In fact, all the 
correspondence on both sides, the Colonial Office's 
as well as the company's, was written by the 
ambidextrous Buller. The scheme provided for an 
advance of £236,000 to the Company, subject to 



270 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

the condition that if the loan were not repaid by 
1850 the Company should resign its charter and 
all its lands in New Zealand, and receive ^268,000 
as compensation for its expenses, to be paid out of 
the proceeds of land sales in the colony. Wakefield, 
in a letter to the colonists of Wellington, dated in 
April 1849, tru ly prophesied that the Company 
would not survive 1850, and added that its dis- 
appearance would be the best thing for New Zealand 
interests, removing a sham representation of them to 
make room, as might be hoped, for a real one. He 
had resigned his directorship in the preceding January, 
on the ostensible ground that the Company would be 
prejudiced by his attacks on Lord Grey in The Art 
of Colonization, but consented that his portrait should 
be painted for the board room. It was a fine picture 
by Collins, nearly identical in attitude with the 
daguerreotype prefixed to this volume, and including 
his favourite Talbot hounds and pet King Charles. 
It came into his possession at the dissolution of the 
company, and was ultimately presented by his son 
to the Provincial Hall at Christchurch. 

While the New Zealand Company began to totter 
downwards like a teetotum whose initial impulse is 
exhausted, Wakefield was entirely withdrawn from 
cognisance of its affairs. Two eminent physicians 
gave him up, but after a while the vigorous constitu- 
tion rallied, and although unable to look at a book 
or paper, he regained physical strength sufficiently 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 271 

to seek relief by easy journeys and short removes 
from place to place, always carrying in his pocket 
a card inscribed, * Do not bleed me.' In the autumn 
of 1847 ne repaired to Malvern, and submitted with 
good results to a course of hydropathic treatment 
under Dr Wilson, the rival of the still more celebrated 
Dr Gully. Thomas Attwood, the celebrated founder 
of the Birmingham Political Union, whose daughter 
Angela had married Wakefield's brother Daniel, and 
whose other daughter Rosabel had been, as we have 
seen, the friend and correspondent of Nina Wakefield, 
was also staying at Malvern, ' and there it was,' says 
his grandson and biographer, Mr Charles Marcus 
Wakefield, * that I had the privilege of seeing these 
extraordinary men together. Though both ranked 
as Radicals, or at least as extreme Liberals, they 
differed greatly in other respects. Attwood was 
utterly incapable of understanding the magnificent 
and far-sighted views of Wakefield on colonial 
subjects.' Attwood, indeed, whose foundation of the 
Birmingham Political Union ensures him a distin- 
guished place in the political history of the country, 
had impaired his influence as a public man by too 
exclusive a devotion to his currency theories, and 
lack of interest in subjects unconnected with paper, 
coin, or bullion. 

A more congenial spirit shared Wakefield's society 
at Malvern, and here it was that the foundations 
of the Canterbury settlement was laid. John Robert 



272 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

Godley, an Irish gentleman of good estate (born 1816), 
had been early attracted by Wakefield's writings on 
colonization, and had proved his own capacity as an 
independent thinker in a remarkable book of American 
travel, published in 1844, but written in the form of 
letters in 1842, when Wakefield was in Canada, and 
the two very probably met ; and still more by a 
bold scheme for meeting the emergency of the Irish 
famine by emigration on a large scale. He proposed 
to locate a million Irishmen in Canada, charging 
the expense upon Irish landed property, and pro- 
viding for the interest by the extension of the 
income tax to Ireland. An excellent project, could 
Godley have guaranteed that the Irish would be 
contented and loyal when settled down next door 
to the United States, but otherwise perilous to the 
Empire and unfair to Canada. Doubts on this 
point may have had their weight in determining 
Ministers to reject it. Published, however, by 
Wakefield's interposition, in the Spectator, it marked 
Godley out as an original thinker and practical 
statesman, and one fitted in every way to co-operate 
with Wakefield in the plan for a Church of England 
colony which had for some time been floating in 
the latter's mind, and which was fully considered 
by the two during their stay at Malvern. This 
remarkable undertaking will form the principal sub- 
ject of the next chapter. 

While the old fruit was falling from, and the new 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 273 

blossom forming upon, the New Zealand orange 
tree at home, the colony itself was entering upon 
an entirely new phase of its history, strongly de- 
marcated from that which had preceded and that 
which was to ensue. It may be briefly described 
as the autocratic phase, during which the affairs of 
the settlement were mainly regulated by one man 
of remarkable strength of will and faculty for rule. 
In Sir George Grey New Zealand had for the first 
time a capable Governor, the very type of the man 
whom the Romans would have entrusted with the 
dictatorship at a period of national peril, but made 
rather to rule a Crown colony than a constitutional 
state. It may have been an instinctive perception of 
his forte and foible that induced him to retain the 
colony in a state of pupilage as long as he could, 
and to take the exceedingly bold step of suspending 
a constitution which had been enacted by Parliament 
in 1846, but which he deemed unsuitable. His 
recalcitrancy was justified by the event. Earl Grey, 
usually so imperious, meekly adopted the view of 
a Governor whose capacity had been so brilliantly 
evinced by the pacification of the Maoris, and whom 
he justly credited with a better understanding of 
New Zealand affairs than was possible to himself; 
and thus a colony which the British Parliament had 
endowed with representative institutions had to sub- 
mit to seven years of personal rule. In theory this 
was indefensible, and the undue prolongation of Sir 



274 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

George Grey's powers in the long run undermined 
his popularity, but no one appears to have been 
enthusiastic for the new constitution, and there 
seems at present a pretty general agreement that 
at the time personal rule was the best thing for 
the colony. The argument which chiefly weighed 
with Earl Grey seems to have been the discontent 
which the new constitution was expected to excite 
among the natives, whom, by insisting on a know- 
ledge of English, it practically excluded from the 
franchise. It may be doubted whether there was 
really much weight in this consideration, but it was 
admirably calculated to impress Ministers at home, 
who dreaded a Maori war above all things ; and 
settlers in the Northern Island, where natives were 
numerous, saw more in it than did settlers in the 
Middle Island, where natives were few. Accord- 
ing to Sir George Grey's own statement through a 
third party to Wakefield, with whom his relations 
were at this time amicable, he would have been 
quite willing to have proclaimed the constitution in 
the Middle Island, ' but he dared not himself make 
such a distinction between North and South, and 
the Office would not take his hints to them that 
they should do it.' * All the Southern settlements,' 
Wakefield adds, c are discontented, and Wellington 
in very hot water.' r This feeling gathered strength 
as time went on, and, together with an unfortunate 

' The Founders of Canterbury, pp. 70, 71. 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 275 

land policy, accounts for the comparative unpopu- 
larity, towards the conclusion of his term of office, 
of a Governor who had rendered the colony such 
signal services. The Maoris, on the other hand, 
gave him the strongest demonstrations of their grati- 
tude and esteem. His position towards them had 
been peculiar. He was the first Governor who 
had been pro-Maori without being pro-missionary. 
Although a religious man — the intimate friend of 
Bishop Selwyn and the author of the first draft 
of the constitution of the Church of New Zealand 
— Grey was by no means under missionary influence. 
His proceedings towards missionaries who had specu- 
lated in land went far to justify the original con- 
tention of the New Zealand Company. One great 
mistake he made in conjunction with Bishop Selwyn 
— his interference with the devoted missionary, Henry 
Williams. The circumstance that the biographers 
of the Governor and Bishop alike avoid all mention 
of this affair, while the biographer of the missionary 
and the historian of the New Zealand Church relate 
it at great length, is abundantly significant. This, 
however, was but an incident. Sir George Grey 
did everything for the natives that could be done 
in his time. The diffusion of education among 
their children, actively promoted by the present 
New Zealand Government, is the only measure 
which can save them from extinction by reforming 
their insanitary habits ; but this was impossible 



276 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

until more of their territory, useless to themselves, 
should have passed into the hands of white men, 
and they should thus have become permeated with 
European influences. Sir George Grey did much 
by the acquisition of enormous tracts of waste land 
in the thinly-peopled Middle Island, under the same 
system of reserves for native benefit as that expounded 
by Wakefield to the Committee of 1840. 

Sir George Grey's chief mistakes were in connec- 
tion with that thorniest of colonial subjects — the 
land question. By endeavouring to frustrate the 
decision of Parliament that the New Zealand Com- 
pany should receive compensation for their land out 
of the proceeds of land sales, he lost the confidence 
of the Colonial Office, his relations with which were 
never again quite satisfactory. A more serious error 
was the reduction on his own authority, and within 
a short time of his retirement, of the price of 
Crown lands from one pound to ten shillings and 
five shillings an acre. It is doubtful whether he 
had any power to make such an enactment, but all 
felt that the matter ought to have been left to the 
Colonial Parliament then about to be convoked 
under the new constitution. Wakefield, upon his 
arrival in New Zealand, tested the legality of the 
Governor's proceedings, and gained his case in the 
colonial court, but the decision was overruled at 
home. The cheapening of land, besides destroying 
the fund for emigration, excited violent discontent 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 277 

among those who had already purchased land at 
higher prices ; but the most serious objection was 
that it played directly into the hands of speculators, 
and frustrated the object which Sir George Grey 
himself most desired to promote. The result fully 
vindicated Wakefield's theory of the sufficient price, 
if only as a barrier against 'land-sharks.' It is thus 
stated by Mr Gisborne, a writer in general most 
favourable to Sir George Grey : — 

4 The intention, no doubt, was to place the ac- 
quisition of freeholds within the reach of every 
man ; but the result was directly the reverse. 
Rent-holders and speculators were only too suc- 
cessful in monopolising at nominal cost enormous 
territories, and those of them who were not rich 
enough, or who could not borrow enough to do 
this at once, c picked out the eyes of the land,' to 
use an expressive phase, in order to render the 
remainder of the land of little or no value to any 
but themselves. The effect has been to lock up 
large estates in the hands of comparatively few land- 
holders.' 

It has been alleged in extenuation that Sir George 
Grey intended to have checked the accumulation of 
landed property in few hands by the imposition 
of a land tax, but there must be some mistake 
about this. To have invited purchase, and then 
saddled the purchaser with a tax of which he had 
had no warning, would have been an act of bad 



278 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

faith of which so just and honourable a governor 
as Sir George Grey would have been incapable. 

Up to the time of his resistance to the satisfaction 
of their claims, Sir George Grey had not deserved ill 
of the New Zealand Company. He had been on 
specially friendly terms with their principal agent. 
Writing to his sister on March 29, 1847, Colonel 
Wakefield says : — 

' We made a trip to New Plymouth and Nelson, 
and passed three weeks very agreeably in one of the 
most powerful and well fitted up of H.M.'s steam 
vessels. No two people can be on better terms 
personally than Captain Grey and I am.' He adds, 
indeed, i Our politics are nevertheless as agitated as 
ever, and the Governor and I do not always agree — 
besides, now the Company has to economise, I get the 
ill-will and opposition of a considerable number of 
the settlers, who prefer a Government that spends a 
deal of money. But I came prepared for all this, 
and have many sincere friends.' 

Grey's goodwill to the Company at this time was 
further evinced by the active assistance which he gave 
in adjusting its controversies with the settlers who had 
made purchases on the faith of its guarantee. The 
ultimate arrangement was embodied in a memor- 
andum drawn up on September 15, 1848, on which 
very day William Wakefield was struck by apoplexy. 
He expired on September 19. 'During the last three 
years,' wrote Sir George Grey, ( I have been in con- 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 279 

stant communication with Colonel Wakefield upon a 
great variety of subjects connected with the interests 
of New Zealand, and have found not only that he 
possessed abilities of a very high order, but that his 
whole attention and thoughts were directed to the 
single subject of the advancement of the interests of 
this country.' No man had been more fiercely 
assailed, but he had lived down opposition, and New 
Zealand has never seen such another funeral proces- 
sion as that which accompanied his body to the 
grave. 

When William Wakefield closed his eyes in New 
Zealand, his brother was writing The Art of Coloniza- 
tion at the Chateau Mabille, Boulogne. He was at the 
time not quite off with the old love nor yet quite on 
with the new. The New Zealand Company had, in 
his view, been virtually destroyed by the agreement of 
1847, yet he clung to the hope that it might in some 
measure be redeemed by an alliance with the new 
association which had grown out of his conferences 
with Godley at Malvern. This project, on the other 
hand, was not yet fairly launched, nor could be for 
some time, because, as Wakefield wrote in May, ■ In 
consequence of Lord Grey's utter neglect of his own 
New Zealand polity, there is at present no land on 
which to plant the settlement.' The intended work 
on colonization, much talked of and never seen, had 
obtained in his own circle the appellation of 'Mrs 
Harris,' which explains several playful allusions in his 



280 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

letters. He arrived at the Chateau Mabille in June, 
and, in July, summoned Mr Albert Allom (afterwards 
Colonial Secretary at Tobago, son of the faithful 
friend who had nursed him in his illness, and brother 
of his former secretary in Canada) to assist him in the 
preparation of the book as amanuensis. Mr Allom, 
however, did not arrive until September, when the 
composition of the work was begun in earnest. 

4 His health,' says Mr Allom in the little pamphlet 
of reminiscences recently published by him in Tas- 
mania, c did not permit him to work more than four 
or five hours a day, and this only was accomplished 
by extreme regularity in taking morning and evening 
exercise. As the winter approached, we often sallied 
forth before daylight, regardless of the weather, our 
pockets filled with ripe pears, and scoured the country 
with his fine, well-known Talbot hounds and beautiful 
little beagles, whose alternate deep baying and yelping 
in the darkness of the morning the farmers and others 
have good reason to remember. When at work, he 
would slowly pace up and down the room, dictating 
to me the copy, pausing occasionally the more care- 
fully to frame a sentence or to choose a particular 
word. 1 He seldom made a correction. The day's 
work had generally been well thought out previously. 
Plodding on steadily day by day, the work was 

1 It is remarkable that Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations was com- 
posed in exactly the same manner, a circumstance which must have 
been well known to Wakefield. 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 281 

finished on Christmas Eve, 1848. I had only just 
enough time to pack up the manuscript and hurry 
with it on board the steamer leaving at midnight for 
London. The next morning the manuscript was 
delivered to Mr Rintoul.' 

The book was published by John William Parker, 
publisher of Stuart Mill, Maurice, Kingsley, and so 
many more of the best thinkers of the time, on 
February 5, 1849. The full title was A View of 
the Art of Colonization, with Present Reference to the 
British Empire; in Letters between a Statesman and 
a Colonist. Edited by (one of the writers) Edward 
Gibbon Wakefield. It was dedicated in terms of 
warm affection to Mr John Hutt, one of Wake- 
field's earliest friends and supporters. 

From various passages in his letters, it would appear 
that Wakefield anticipated tangible political results 
from The Art of Colonization. These certainly were 
not forthcoming, and for a reason which ought not 
to have escaped his sagacity. The book was ill fitted 
to attract novices, and those who had already attended 
to the subject could only say, ' We knew this before.' 
Like most important discoveries, the Wakefield gospel 
is a very simple one, admitting indeed of continual 
repetition, but not of republication. Once prove that 
the backward state of the colonies arose from the 
divorce of land and labour occasioned by the practice 
of giving away land for a nominal price, and that the 
land ought to be made the machine of its own cul- 



282 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

tivation, by selling it at a good price and employing 
the proceeds of the sale by settling it with labourers, 
and there remained no principle to enunciate which 
could impress the thinker, or influence the enthusiasm 
of the nation at large. Everything vital to the com- 
prehension of Wakefield's theory had long been before 
the world, his views had undergone no such modifi- 
cation as to necessitate restatement, and the further 
illustration and exposition he now gave, though highly 
acceptable, and though some topics, such as the 
disadvantage of land sales by auction in comparison 
with sales at a uniform price, were treated at more 
length than heretofore, was in no way sensational. 
This was an epithet more applicable to the early part 
of the book, with its lively attacks upon Earl Grey, 
whom Wakefield regarded as the marplot from 
within, as Stanley had been the enemy from without. 
But although such passages might help the book to 
find readers, they obviously could contribute nothing 
to its scientific value, and, animated as they are, it 
might have been wished that they had been omitted, 
but for the glimpses they afford of Wakefield's own 
practical activity as an actual planner and founder of 
colonies. 

There is no sign of failing literary power in The 
Art of Colonisation, unless it be a certain difFuseness, 
due in part to the machinery of the book. This is 
an interchange of letters between a statesman and a 
colonist, founded, Wakefield asserts in the preface, 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 283 

upon actual correspondence. There seems internal 
evidence that such was actually the case. The 
method of the composition of the book, however, as 
described by Mr Allom, shows that but little of the 
original documents can be left. The statesman is 
represented as seeking enlightenment through the 
medium of oral discussion, which Wakefield would 
no doubt have preferred. C E. G. W.,' writes Mr 
Allom, c was a master in the art of persuading. He 
seldom failed if he could get his victim into conversa- 
tion.' But physically, he was no longer the man he 
had been. 

c My health, instead of improving, has got worse 
lately, and will probably never mend. It is a disorder 
of the nerves which has long hindered, and now 
absolutely precludes, me from engaging in the oral 
discussion of subjects that deeply interest me, more 
especially if they are subjects involving argument and 
continuous thought. You must have observed how I 
suffered towards the end of our last conversation. At 
length I cannot disobey the doctor's injunction to 
stay at home and be quiet, without effects that remind 
me of a bird trying to fly with a broken wing, and 
knocking itself to pieces in the vain exertion. As 
respects earnest conversation, I am a helpless cripple. 
But there occurs to me an alternative. With the 
seeming caprice of most nervous disorders, mine, 
which forbids talking, makes far less difficulty about 
letting me write. The brain suffers greatly only 



284 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

when it is hurried — as with old hunters, "'tis the 
pace that kills " — but can work somehow when 
allowed to take its own time.' 

Such a machinery, whether growing out of an 
actual state of things or deliberately adopted for 
literary purposes, has manifest advantages and de- 
fects. It is a distinct gain in vivacity of presenta- 
tion ; it breaks up the subject into manageable 
sections, and diversifies it with an agreeable infusion 
of personal feeling. At the same time it is both 
artificial and inartificial. The statesman, whether a 
real entity or not, is evidently merely put forward 
to allow Wakefield to advance what he wishes, and 
whether because a man with many interests is unable 
to correspond on even terms with a man with one, 
or whether Wakefield tires of writing dummy letters 
to himself, the disciple almost disappears from the 
latter part of the correspondence. On the other hand, 
the machinery suits Wakefield, who, to his great merit 
as a master of homely, forcible English, did not add the 
artistic instinct which would have enabled him to group 
and display his subject as a whole. Desultory he must 
be, and desultoriness is less observable in a series of 
letters than in a formal treatise. 

The Art of Coloni%ation, then, could not be epoch- 
making, for the epoch was made ; nor could it present 
the results of the author's speculations and experience 
in a symmetrical and classical form. On the other 
hand there is a singular fascination about the earlier 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 285 

part of the book — ' the personalities and the egotism,' 
as the writer calls it in a letter to Rintoul. As a 
mere question of literary taste, these would perhaps 
have been better away, but we must be thankful for 
the window thus opened into the breast of a remark- 
able man, and pleased with what it discloses. There 
is nothing spiteful about the personality, nothing mean 
about the egotism, they are rather like lyric utter- 
ances, the indignant cry of an artist who models 
colonies as others model statues or poems, and whose 
special grievance it is that his work is not only under- 
valued but disfigured. It is impossible not to confess 
that his idea is far more to him than any concurrent 
influence or emolument, and that his whole soul is in 
his noble and disinterested definition of the summum 
bonum: 'The utmost happiness which God vouch- 
safes TO MAN ON EARTH, THE REALISATION OF HIS 
OWN IDEA.' 

The most original part of The Art of Colonization, 
putting aside all that had been original when Wake- 
field first propounded it, but had become common 
property by the discussion it had since undergone, is 
descriptive of the impediments to colonization by 
reason of the too frequently low standard of morals 
and manners in the colonies, and by the subjection 
of the colonists to irresponsible officialism. The 
latter evil has long since disappeared in self-governed 
colonies ; when Wakefield wrote it was sufficiently 
real, and the extension of the principle of responsible 



286 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

government from Canada to the other colonies, 
mainly inhabited by white settlers, remained a lead- 
ing object with him to the end of his political career. 
The treatment of the other topic shows how deep a 
hold the Canterbury project had taken upon him. c I 
am bound to add,' he says, c that my notions on this 
subject were not originally formed in my own mind, 
but, for the most part, suggested to me by Dr Hinds,' 
the author, it will be remembered, of the chapter in the 
original manual of New Zealand colonization which 
dwelt on the advantage which would accrue to the 
colony from getting a bishop. Wakefield thought so 
too, but he also thought that the obligations of church 
and colony would be mutual. ' The Free Church of 
Scotland,' he wrote to Godley, 'finds the Otago colony 
a most valuable topic in its intercourse with the public. 
It is a very interesting topic. So is the conversion of 
savages, as used by the Church Missionary Society. 
There is something in it which appeals pleasantly to 
the imagination and the best feelings. Whereas the 
sole topic of the Propagation Society is religious desti- 
tution in the colonies, which is a painful topic and one 
of which people soon weary.' One of the finest 
passages in The Art of Colonization is an eulogium on 
the special deserts of the Wesleyan body. 

Nothing of Wakefield's own in The Art of Coloniza- 
tion equals in a literary point of view the quotation 
from Charles Buller's character of ' Mr Mother- 
country ' in the little book on Responsible Government 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 287 

for the Colonies previously mentioned. ' Mr Mother- 
country' is a leading figure throughout the latter 
part of the book, and the name is assuredly well 
chosen to imply that any opponent of the colonial 
reformers must be something of an old woman. 
Its personal application to Sir James Stephen was 
most unjust. It is impossible to read Sir James 
Stephen's letters, to go no further, without dis- 
cerning in him an admirable man of high capacity. 
The satire, nevertheless, is deadly in so far as 
it strikes the abuses of the only system of govern- 
ment which no one defends, and at the same 
time the only system of which it is impossible 
to get rid. Monarchs may be dethroned, aris- 
tocracies exiled, democracies enslaved, but neither 
monarchy, aristocracy nor democracy can ever dis- 
pense with bureaucracy ; the responsible government 
on the spot which Wakefield and Buller invoked 
to supplant the distant and irresponsible bureaucrat 
in Downing Street must have its own civil service, 
and there as here the clerk versed in affairs will 
rule the uninformed minister. The removal, how- 
ever, through the concession of responsible govern- 
ment, of a deadweight of unpopularity from the 
Colonial Office, was not the least of the good 
effects of the system of local government advocated 
by Wakefield and Buller. If they had known 
all that has since come to light about the inner 
workings of the Office, they must have thought 



288 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

more favourably of individuals, while at the same 
time they must have felt more anxiety than ever to 
modify a system where the best intentions of rulers 
were liable to be frustrated by the cross-currents of 
politics. 

Where the 'Mr Mother-country' of The Art oj 
Colonization represents the opponents of the vital prin- 
ciples of Wakefield's system, he is entirely in place, 
but where he merely personifies the general spirit of 
official obstructiveness he is an excrescence upon a 
book whose sole aim should have been to instruct in 
the art and mystery of planting colonies. Misled into 
polemics, the author left this unwritten. As, never- 
theless, the book is his last, it presents an opportunity 
of stating the general judgment of economists upon 
the Wakefield system more than sixty years after its 
promulgation. This may be best accomplished by 
citing the judgment of the modern economist who 
has discussed it with most thoroughness, and who is 
at the same time a recognised authority — M. Leroy- 
Beaulieu, in his treatise, De la Colonisation chez les 
Peuples Modernes, 1886. M. Leroy-Beaulieu's judg- 
ment appears at first sight a mixture of praise and 
censure, but upon attentive examination he proves 
more eulogistic than he supposes himself to be. He 
calls the theory a mixture of wheat and tares, but 
when the tares are pointed out it appears that they 
are none of Wakefield's sowing. The chief defect 
of the Wakefield system, in M. Leroy-Beaulieu's eyes, 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 289 

seems to be the pretension which he attributes to it 
of a rigorously scientific and almost mathematical 
character. No such pretension is to be found in the 
writings of Wakefield, who was himself so far from 
attributing a strictly consistent and homogeneous 
character to his system as to have declared that, 
although he attached the greatest importance to the 
employment of the proceeds of land sales in bringing 
over emigrants, still, if only the giving away of land 
or its disposal at a nominal value could be checked by 
the establishment of a sufficient price, the main point 
would be gained, even though these proceeds were 
thrown into the sea. After this criticism, which 
really has no application to the system as Wakefield 
conceived it, M. Leroy-Beaulieu gives his entire 
adhesion to its two main principles — the sale of land at 
a substantial price and the immigration fund — merely 
observing that the entire proceeds of the land sales 
cannot be safely devoted to this object, which Wake- 
field himself admitted, and pointing out that Govern- 
ment assistance must almost always be necessary. 
His censure of the phrase 'self-supporting colony,' 
employed by some of the promoters of South 
Australian colonisation, merely repeats Wakefield's 
own statement to the South Australian Committee 
that he regarded this phrase as quackery. M. Leroy- 
Beaulieu does not advert to the chief practical diffi- 
culty — that of maintaining a steady influx of new 
labour after the first batch of labourers had become 



290 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

independent. 1 In the main his view of the system 
seems to differ but slightly from that of its founder ; 
it is only to be regretted that the South Australian 
disasters are so presented that it might appear on 
a superficial view as though M. Leroy-Beaulieu 
regarded them as in some way consequences of the 
method adopted in the settlement of the colony, 
which it is nevertheless evident that he does not. 

The practical results of the system spoke suffi- 
ciently for themselves. It had the fullest and fairest 
trial in Canterbury and Otago. 'Out of 11,915,303 
acres,' says Mr Rusden, ' sold from the foundation of 
the colony till 31st of October 1876 for £8,101,859, 
the enormous proportion of £5,395,000 had been 
received by Canterbury and Otago for less than 
4,500,000 acres. For about the same land as that 
sold by Auckland, Canterbury had received thirteen 
times as much money.' 

It would appear, then, that land was thirteen times 
as dear in Canterbury as in Auckland, and that 
nevertheless Canterbury sold as much land as Auck- 
land, and had thirteen times as much revenue from 
this source to devote to immigration and public 
improvements. In Victoria, by 1858, three millions 
of acres had been sold for £4,800,000, which, under 

1 Labour soon became scarce in most of the New Zealand Company's 
settlements. ' The only cuss of this colony,' wrote a woman who had 
emigrated with her husband, * is the exhorburnt wagers one has to pay.' 
' She liked,' comments Wakefield, * the " exhorburnt wagers " while her 
husband received them.' 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 291 

the old system of New South Wales, from which 
Victoria had been detached, would have been given 
away in extensive tracts to individuals and have 
remained uncultivated. Even in New South Wales 
after the regulations in 1831, although the price put 
upon land was no more than five shillings an acre, 
the revenue from land sales rose from £10,000 in 
1832 to £130,000 in 1836. c In this manner,' Mr 
Elliott, the Emigration Commissioner, told the Lords' 
Committee on New Zealand in 1838, 'assisted 
emigration began immediately, and, the moment 
that commenced, a voluntary emigration arose also.' 
This tendency of emigration defrayed from the land 
fund to generate a simultaneous and independent 
stream of spontaneous emigration, was a noteworthy 
and valuable feature. While the former movement, 
controlled by intelligent directors with the object of 
providing the new country with the pick and flower 
of the old, contributed the elements best calculated 
to build up a prosperous state in the future, any 
tendency towards pedantry or over-regulation was 
checked by the second current, affording more play 
to the forces of nature. The high level of the 
colonies founded on the Wakefield principle is 
notorious, and was enhanced by its further develop- 
ment in enlisting religious bodies as colonising agents. 
Nothing in the system deserves more commendation 
than its scientific character, its progress on regular 
principles, and its administration by persons, whether 



292 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

public commissioners or private bodies, earnestly but 
disinterestedly concerned for its success. In this 
respect it surpassed even Greek colonization ; not, 
however, by contrivance, but from the nature of the 
case. The Greeks, going forth to occupy a small 
territory, the whole of which was to be appropriated 
at once, were of necessity in sufficient force for the 
undertaking, and hence needed no reinforcements, 
and were from the very beginning an independent 
and self-subsisting power. The English, settling in 
regions too extensive for anything but the merest 
beginnings of occupation, were long in need of the 
tutelage of the mother country, and she, had she 
rightly understood her place and mission, might have 
nursed them into a more intimate connection than 
Greece ever conceived. 

The Wakefield system was of course violently 
attacked by those who wished to acquire extensive 
tracts of land at nominal prices, and the assumed 
interest of the poor was generally made the stalking 
horse of such persons. In fact, so long as the price 
set upon the land was sufficient to deter large 
purchasers, no contrivance could be better adapted to 
favour the multiplication of small landowners. No 
colony that gave it a fair trial has ever definitely 
rejected it, and if it is now tacitly laid aside in most 
of them, one chief reason is that it has mainly done 
its work, carrying them on to the period when the 
cheapness and facility of communication make regular 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 293 

systems for directing the tide of emigration super- 
fluous, and when the growth of an indigenous popula- 
tion render emigration less vitally necessary. In 
Canterbury, where it had the fairest trial and pro- 
duced the most striking results, many of those who 
bought land under its provisions suffered from the 
unprofitableness of farming produced by the great 
decline in the value of the chief colonial staples after 
1872. Yet when all is said, in the opinion of the 
present Agent-General of New Zealand, who was 
brought up in Canterbury, much and solid settle- 
ment remains as its result, and little would ever have 
been said against it had the letting of a portion of the 
agricultural lands gone on, pari passu, with the sale of 
freeholds. The parting with land for cash, had it 
been applied to a portion instead of the whole of the 
public estate, might have found the funds for carrying 
on colonising work without becoming an instrument to 
effect the wild land speculation which, following on the 
Vogel borrowing policy between 1872 and 1879, half 
ruined a generation of Canterbury settlers. As to 
that speculation, mischievous as it was, it is obviously 
not to be charged against Wakefield that he did not 
foresee the relation to his land system of a Public 
Works Loan Policy conceived many years after his 
death. Little of the earth's surface is now available 
for colonization in the proper sense of the term ; 
should Britain, however, ever again become possessed 
of an unoccupied tract enjoying a temperate climate 



294 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

and otherwise fit to be the cradle of a nation, she will 
hardly find a better way of peopling it with settlers 
representative of all that is best in herself than that 
devised by Edward Gibbon Wakefield. 

The Art of Colonization might have been a more 
perfect book but for the misfortune which deprived 
it of the revision of Charles Buller, who died un- 
expectedly at the end of November 1848. He had 
visited Wakefield in the previous month to discuss 
a plan of colonization c for the special use and benefit 
of the Milesian-Irish race, who never colonize, but 
only emigrate miserably,' which Wakefield had pre- 
pared in concert with Godley. It was then intended 
to have formed a section of The Art of Colonization^ 
but 'it was ultimately agreed that the plan would 
stand a better chance of being soon adopted by Parlia- 
ment if it were not published in my book.' It was 
consequently reserved to be used by Buller as might 
be deemed most expedient, but his death frustrated 
the project, 'and,' says Wakefield, 'the plan is still 
in my desk.' What became of it has not been 
ascertained. 

No circumstance in Wakefield's life affords a more 
substantial guarantee of his worth than his long and, 
notwithstanding his disapproval of the New Zealand 
Company's agreement, and his complaint that ' Earl 
Grey had spoiled Buller for a colonial reformer,' un- 
troubled friendship with so choice a spirit as Charles 
Buller. ' A sound, penetrating intellect, full of adroit 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 295 

resources, and loyal by nature itself to all that was 
methodic, manful, true,' as Carlyle wrote in the 
Examiner. Wakefield composed no set eulogium on 
his friend, but erected a memorial to him by reprinting 
as an appendix to his own book Buller's great speech 
on * Systematic Colonization' in 1843, an eloquent 
and luminous exposition of the advantage to a 
great industrial country of peopling the world with 
her children. 

The New Zealand Company survived its champion 
by about a year and a half. In 1850, although its 
existence was nominally protracted some time for 
the sake of winding up its affairs, it virtually came 
to an end through its inability to repay its borrow- 
ings from Government. Its charter was sur- 
rendered, and the compensation due to it, assessed 
upon the proceeds of colonial land sales, was paid 
with much discontent by the colony — an iniquity, 
if such it were, necessary to prevent a greater 
iniquity. With a higher level of public spirit the 
sum would have been paid by the nation. For, 
though sunk into decrepitude in the absence of 
its leading spirit, the Company had had a heroic 
past. It had laid the foundations of empire broad 
and deep. Four flourishing settlements owed their 
existence to it ; to two others it had given effi- 
cacious assistance. In 1851 these settlements con- 
tained 17,000 white inhabitants — but for Govern- 
ment interference Wakefield thought there would 



296 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

have been 200,000. It had baffled potentates 
abroad and shaken ministries at home. It 
deserved the most especial praise for its careful 
selection of emigrants, a prepared soil from which 
none but good fruit could spring — c men,' said 
Wakefield, 'already before they left home more 
accustomed to deal with matters of a common 
concern, of a public character, and of the highest 
importance to themselves collectively, than are any 
equal number of average Englishmen who stay at 
home, and who generally seem fitted to be the 
subjects and machines, rather than the springs and 
managers, of government.' Yet what was done 
was but little in comparison with what might 
have been done if they who wished to enlarge 
the empire had not been treated as though they 
wished to dismember it — if the rulers of the land, 
leagues behind its thinkers and its poets, had not 
assumed the old hopeless attitude of 

1 Blind Authority beating ivitk his staff 
The child that would have led him.'' 



CHAPTER XI 

CHURCH COLONIZATION THE FREE CHURCH COLONY 

AT OTAGO THE CANTERBURY SETTLEMENT 

LORD LYTTELTON GODLEY AS SUPERINTENDENT 

FELIX WAKEFIELD ON THE COLONY THE NEW 

ZEALAND CONSTITUTION LIFE AT REDHILL AND 

REIGATE WAKEFIELD LEAVES ENGLAND FOR 

NEW ZEALAND 

Via prima salutis, 
Quod minime reris, Graia fandetur ab urbe. 

Surely it was by the spirit of prophecy that the pioneer 
vessel of New Zealand colonization was named the 
Tory. During the turmoil of the Company's battle 
with Lord Stanley, Wakefield must have been far 
from foreseeing that his ideas would be taken up 
and carried out by that nobleman's political sup- 
porters, and that New Zealand would wait for a 
constitution until the Colonial Secretary had be- 
come Prime Minister. It had seemed an axiom 
to him, as to all, that reform must proceed from 
reformers. The attitude of stolid resistance to all 
change assumed by the Tory party when he en- 

297 



298 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

tered public life would alone have constrained him 
to range himself with the Radicals, and he would 
have been found sitting and voting with Grote and 
Molesworth but for the disaster which destroyed 
his prospect of a parliamentary career. He had 
since c mended his shell with pearl' to some pur- 
pose, but so had the Tories. A ' Young England ' 
school had been growing up, influenced in' no 
small measure by modern ideas, but whose special 
mission it was to take up the old mediaeval prin- 
ciples and graft them upon the new era. Carlyle's 
Past and Present expresses the essence and quint- 
essence of this mode of thought, which pervades 
the contemporary novels of Disraeli, and was especi- 
ally represented by those young Tories whom a 
breach with their party on the question of free 
trade had constrained to set up for themselves as 
Peelites. To these Wakefield's theories presented 
a different aspect to that which had chiefly im- 
pressed the economists of the Mill and Molesworth 
type. Although the sufficient price and the im- 
migration fund had been the corner stones of the 
system, still the Letter from Sydney had laid hardly 
less stress upon the necessity of systematic coloniza- 
tion by well - selected emigrants, observing a due 
proportion of the sexes ; and all the arrangements 
for the sale of land implied the persistence of social 
distinctions. The young Tories naturally agreed 
with Wakefield in preferring an aristocracy to a 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 299 

plutocracy, and were powerfully attracted by the 
vision of a well-ordered colony in which squire 
and clergyman should exert a preponderating in- 
fluence. Wakefield himself, as we have seen, had 
warned them that England could not be repro- 
duced in the Antipodes, and that those institu- 
tions alone could bear transplantation whose fitness 
could bear the test of experiment. The Peelites, 
on their part, nothing doubted the ability of princes 
and prelates, churches and colleges, coronets and 
chasubles, all things which the spirit of the age 
threatened with extinction at home, to acclimatise 
themselves beyond the seas. Strangely enough, it 
was precisely the Puseyite section of the Tory 
party, with the highest notions and most retro- 
grade tendencies in ecclesiastical matters, that enter- 
tained the most liberal views in secular affairs. 
It was they who had broken with the bulk of 
their party on the Corn Law question, and now 
presented the phenomenon of a phalanx of Liberal 
High Churchmen, the essential point of whose con- 
tention was that the Church was a vital institution 
in harmony with the deepest needs of the age ; 
nor could Wakefield be more ready to take up the 
Church for the sake of colonization than they were 
to take up colonization for the sake of the Church. 
The emigration of religious bodies had been a 
leading feature of seventeenth century colonization. 
Wakefield awards the credit of reviving it to Dr 



300 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

Hinds ; but the germ of it may be detected in a note 
to his own England and America , vol. II., p. 255, and 
his letter to his sister respecting the Bishopric of New 
Zealand, already cited, proves how warmly he entered 
into it. 'Bishop Selwyn's see,' he says, writing to 
Godley on 21st December 1847, <was created by us 
in spite of many obstacles put in our way by the 
Church and the Government. Indeed, we forced the 
measure on the Melbourne Government ; and in that 
measure originated all the new Colonial Bishoprics. 
If our views had been taken up by the Church, great 
results would have been obtained, both for the Church 
and colonization.' His own sympathies were by no 
means ecclesiastical ; his creed appears to have been a 
masculine Theism ; but to get his plans adopted in 
influential quarters, and to secure desirable emigrants 
for his beloved colony, he would have transplanted the 
Grand Lama of Tibet with all his praying wheels, and 
did actually nibble at the Chief Rabbi. He enter- 
tained, moreover, a statesmanlike conviction of the 
importance of fostering the religious element in a 
colony, both on its own account and for all that it 
implies. He says in The Art of Colonization, c A colony 
that is not attractive to women is an unattractive 
colony ; in order to make it attractive to both sexes, 
you do enough if you take care to make it attractive 
to women. Women are more religious than men — or, 
at all events, there are more religious women than 
religious men. You might persuade religious men to 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 301 

emigrate, and yet in time have a colony of which the 
morals and manners would be detestable ; but if you 
persuade religious women to emigrate, the whole 
colony will be comparatively virtuous and polite.' 
Further on, following Godley in his Letters fro?n 
America^ he points out that the early American 
colonists did not so much resort thither to escape 
religious persecution as to 'find a place where their 
own religion would be the religion of the place,' and 
that this system answered. c All that colonization was 
more or less a religious colonization ; the parts of it 
that prospered the most were the most religious parts ; 
the prosperity was chiefly occasioned by the respect- 
ability of the emigration ; and the respectability of 
the emigration to each colony had a close relation to 
the force of the religious attraction. I am in hopes,' 
he adds, c of being able, when the proper time shall 
come for that part of my task, to persuade you that it 
would now be easy for England to plant sectarian 
colonies ; that is, colonies with the strong attraction 
for superior emigrants of a peculiar religious creed in 
each colony.' This was written in 1848, but the idea 
had been worked out in theory, and seemed on the point 
of execution in 1 843, as shown by a letter to his sister, 
undated, but which the announcement of the resump- 
tion of land sales in virtue of an agreement between 
the New Zealand Company and Lord Stanley proves 
to have been written in the May of that year. 

'The project of a new colony in New Zealand is 



302 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

so nearly ripe that I want to talk with you and 
Charles about it. It will be a Church of England 
colony ; that is, the foundation fund of the colony 
will contain ample endowments for religious and 
educational purposes in connection with our Church 
exclusively. A body of colonists will be formed here 
in conjunction with eminent clergymen and laymen 
of the Church of England not intending to emigrate, 
and this body will mature the plan and offer it to the 
New Zealand Company, by whom it will be accepted. 
The project, which is mine own, is warmly approved, 
and will have the zealous support of the Church and 
eminent laymen. Dr Hinds, who is here, will work 
at it. . . . 

'The settlement of our differences with Lord 
Stanley is signed and sealed, and we begin again to- 
day to sell land.' 

It must be supposed that the renewal of disputes 
between the Company and the Colonial Office pre- 
vented the further prosecution of the scheme for a 
Church of England colony at that time. Another 
ecclesiastical colony, however, came almost simultane- 
ously to birth. In July 1842, Mr George Rennie, an 
enterprising Scot, who had for a while represented 
Ipswich in Parliament, had addressed to the New 
Zealand directors a scheme for colonization in the 
Middle Island. Wakefield was then in Canada, and 
the directors referred Mr Rennie to the Government. 
The arrangement concluded with Lord Stanley in 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 303 

May 1843, referred to in Wakefield's letter to his 
sister, quoted above, gave them, however, more 
freedom of action ; and on 23d May, Mr Rennie 
and a new associate, Captain Cargill, returned to the 
charge with a plan embodying the important modifi- 
cations that the new colony should be a Scotch 
Presbyterian one, comprising provision for religious 
and educational purposes, and that the whole -of the 
emigration fund derived from land should be devoted 
to bringing over Scotch labourers only. Five days 
previously the scheme had received a great impetus 
from a great event — the disruption of the Church of 
Scotland on 18th May 1843. Free Kirk sentiment 
was immediately appealed to, to such effect, indeed, 
that the Kirk swallowed up the entire undertaking, 
except the original projector, rejected as an indigestible 
morsel. The New Zealand Company sided with Mr 
Rennie's opponents, the ultra Free Kirk men ; lands 
were acquired from the natives under the auspices of 
Colonel Wakefield in June 1844, and, after many 
vexatious delays, the John Wickliffe and the Philip 
Laing entered Otago Harbour and founded Dunedin, 
capital of Otago, the most southerly of the New 
Zealand provinces. They brought 343 emigrants. 
The progress of the settlement was considered slow ; 
nevertheless, by 1858, there were 7000 inhabitants, 
and 19,000 acres were enclosed. In 1861 came the 
gold discovery and the rush which emptied the little 
settlement to fill it again. By the end of the year 



304 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

20,000 Australians had supervened, swamping the 
original Scotch element, but affording the substantial 
consolation of a rise in the revenue from ^97,000 to 
£470,000. So great was the increase of population 
that, by 1871, the number of pupils in the public 
schools was equal to the entire population in 1858. 

Colonies founded in pursuance of a deliberate plan 
have a double history — that of the emigrants on the 
spot, and that of the contrivers at home. The early 
history of Otago is mainly that of the hardy settlers, 
but the sister colony of Canterbury has a still more 
interesting tale to tell of the struggles undergone on 
its behalf at the other side of the world by men whom 
it merely interested as representing a principle. Here, 
as perhaps nowhere else, we may see a colony in the 
making, exhibited in the correspondence of one of the 
two principal projectors. Mr Jerningham Wakefield's 
grievous neglect of his father's papers is partly re- 
deemed by his having not only preserved, but printed 
Wakefield's letters to Godley and other leading 
persons concerned with the foundation of the settle- 
ment, of which the writer had most fortunately 
preserved copies. The Founders of Canterbury^ con- 
taining this correspondence from November 1847 to 
October 1850, is probably the worthiest monument to 
Wakefield ever raised, for what his other writings left 
matter of inference is here matter of demonstration. 
It might well have been conjectured that so bold a 
theorist, and so sagacious a judge of human nature, 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 305 

would not want boldness or sagacity in action ; but 
here he is found, not merely prescribing recipes for 
colony - making, but himself making the colony. 
What elsewhere may have seemed a dry abstraction 
is here clothed with flesh and blood. We see the 
sanguine, enthusiastic projector, fertile, inventive, 
creative, his head an arsenal of expedients, and every 
failure pregnant with a remedy ; imperious or suasive, 
as suits his turn ; terrible in wrath, and exuberant in 
affection ; commanding, exhorting, entreating, per- 
mitting, as, like an eminent personage of old, he 

* With heady hand, wings or feet ', pursues his way, 
And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies? 

And to what end ? Merely to demonstrate the 
soundness of his ideas by founding a colony, the 
incarnation of his thought, and, in its way, a finished 
work of art. 

The principal actors in this exciting drama, after 
Wakefield himself, are Godley and Lord Lyttelton, 
whose figures, though Wakefield nowhere in this 
correspondence attempts a regular portrait, are clearly 
defined, and might be almost as vivid as Wakefield's, if 
Mr Jerningham Wakefield had performed the obvious 
duty of preserving their letters. Godley 's character 
has been ably portrayed by Mr J. E. FitzGerald, in 
the memoir prefixed to his Writings and Speeches 
(Christchurch, 1863). Mr FitzGerald's estimate con- 
cludes : — 

u 



3 o6 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

c He had not the comprehensive intellect of a great 
philosopher, nor the fire and fancy of a great poet, but 
he had the mind of a practical statesman, clear fore- 
sight and wise judgment, with a resolute will, unim- 
peachable integrity, and a chivalrous sense of honour.' 

In other words, he did not possess Wakefield's 
originality of genius, but was as much a born leader 
of men as Wakefield was a born leader of thought. 

Of Lord Lyttelton, who had had considerable 
experience of colonial affairs as Under Secretary to 
Mr Gladstone, Wakefield gave a glowing character 
in his letter to Godley on the New Zealand con- 
stitution. The principal members of the Canterbury 
Association had been denounced by the Examiner as 
' Jesuits.' 

' I must say another word about two of these 
"Jesuits." The first is Lord Lyttelton, whose in- 
difference to power and fame keep in obscurity his 
singular ability and public spirit. Ever since you 
left England he has made himself a slave to the 
business of promoting New Zealand colonization 
and the reform of colonial government, always ready 
to give his whole time, his whole attention and his 
money without stint to the work in hand ; and this 
without appearing to suppose that he deserves the 
least credit for these sacrifices. I cannot recollect 
another instance of equal modesty and gentle sim- 
plicity of character combined with great talents : 
and, with the exception of Lord Metcalfe, who did 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 307 

not surpass him in this respect, I have never known 
a politician so unlike a Jesuit in love of truth and 
downrightness of conduct.' 

Lord Lyttelton and Godley were distinguished 
from the crowd of politicians in that they were, 
like Wakefield, idealists, but their ideals were not 
quite the same as his. It is doubtful whether either 
would have taken up colonization except in the 
interest of the Church of England ; having once 
done so, however, they became enthusiasts in the 
cause, still keeping the Church mainly in view. 
Wakefield in a measure reversed the process ; he 
could not be as good a churchman as his friends 
were colonizers, yet he becomes almost episcopal as 
he talks of the various candidates for the bishopric. 
One motive he had which his colleagues could not 
share, to confound the renegades, as he deemed them, 
of the old New Zealand Company : — 

Virtu tern •vide ant , intabescantque relict a. 

It is evident from the letter already cited, that the 
idea of a Church colony was in Wakefield's mind in 
May 1843, anc ^ tne further provision defined by 
Mr FitzGerald as the requirement c that ample funds 
should be provided, out of the proceeds of the land 
sales, for the religious and educational wants of the 
community about to be established ' seems an obvious 
corollary, though it need not be doubted that it was 
taken up with especial warmth by Godley. The 
scheme appears to have assumed definite shape at a 



308 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

conference between the two at Malvern on 29th 
November 1847. The part which especially de- 
volved upon Wakefield was to induce the New 
Zealand Company, of which he was still nominally 
a director, and in which two -thirds of the waste 
Crown lands of New Zealand were vested, to dis- 
pose of a sufficient amount of the lands to the 
Church colonizers to set them going : while 
Godley's part, in Mr FitzGerald's words, 'was 
the labour of bringing to the scheme a sufficient 
amount of influence to secure the foundation of 
the new colony.' As a leading contributor to the 
Morning Chronicle^ for which most of the more dis- 
tinguished Peelites wrote, as a brilliant Oxonian of 
High Church tendencies, and a member of several 
leading clubs, he was intimate with most of the 
members of the neo-Conservative party, he found 
no difficulty in interesting men of influence in his 
project, and the indispensable qualification for a 
New Zealand directorship was furnished by a 
nominal transfer of stock from Wakefield. Wake- 
field, on his part, wrote on 30th November to Mr 
John Abel Smith, one of the most important 
directors left on the New Zealand Board, propos- 
ing ' the old plan of a settlement of 300,000 acres 
to be purchased from the company for ten shillings 
per acre.' It was at the time intended that the 
location should be the valley of the Ruamahanga, 
near Wellington, and it is not quite clear when the 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 309 

Canterbury Plains in the Middle Island were de- 
cided upon as the site of the settlement. The 
company took up the idea ; a ' Canterbury Associa- 
tion ' was formed by Godley's exertions, which in 
due time obtained a charter. Land was to be sold 
on the Wakefield system at a 'sufficient price,' but 
here the weak point — not fatal but unquestionably 
troublesome — of religious colonies came in. To 
induce the Church to enter into the scheme, it was 
necessary to set aside a portion of the funds for 
public worship and religious education, and as this 
could only be got out of the proceeds of the land 
sales, the price of the land was necessarily raised 
to meet the demand, and was thus rendered exces- 
sive. It was fixed at three pounds per acre, and 
the proportion of this devoted to church and school 
buildings being no less than one-third, it followed 
that one pound out of three was an unreproductive 
investment. At the same time, the high price 
dismayed emigrants, as the promoters found to 
their cost when they appealed to the public for 
support. The more ecclesiastically minded among 
them probably rejoiced in the expectation that this 
regulation would keep out dissenters, who would 
hardly pay a pound an acre for the privilege of 
sending their children to High Church schools ; but 
even bigotry and virtue lost their attractiveness in 
the presence of excessive price. The experiment, 
well worth trying, will hardly be tried again ; but 



3io BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

the colony could not have been launched without 
it, and, after all, proved no failure, and had the 
especial advantage of enriching New Zealand with 
emigrants of an especially high standard of character 
and culture — c Canterbury pilgrims,' among whom 
knights, squires, franklins, parsons, lawyers and 
physicians constituted a numerous and substantial 
element. 'The young men of Godley's school,' 
wrote Wakefield, 'resemble, both in head and heart, 
the nobler spirits of Elizabeth's time.' 

By the middle of 1848 the affairs of the embryo 
settlement had progressed sufficiently to justify the 
despatch of Captain Thomas as agent to occupy 
and clear the ground : but for some time afterwards 
they appear to have languished, and it was not until 
the winter of 1849 that the state of Godley's 
health brought about the step to which the 
ultimate success of the colony is mainly to be attri- 
buted, his mission as general manager and superin- 
tendent. It had been proposed that he should spend 
the winter in Italy. Wakefield warmly, almost pas- 
sionately, urged that the equally mild climate of 
New Zealand should have the preference, and Godley 
sailed at the beginning of December. His first act 
on arriving was to stop all expenditure, Captain 
Thomas having considerably overdrawn his means ; 
and then, finding that the expected colonists did 
not arrive, he betook himself to Wellington, where 
he successfully opposed a scheme brought forward 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 311 

by Sir George Grey for the government of New 
Zealand. It was not until November 1850 that, 
after raising ^5000 for the advantage of the 
settlement upon his own security, he returned to 
Canterbury upon hearing of the actual despatch 
of a body of emigrants in September. For nearly 
two years from that period, in the language of a 
settler, c his word was law.' ' Not with coffers full 
and facilities abundant,' says Mr FitzGerald, 'but 
in poverty of funds, amidst great difficulties, amidst 
much discontent, amidst the disappointment of many 
sanguine expectations, and the ill-concealed hostility 
of a Government [Sir George Grey's] which appeared 
vexed at the additional trouble imposed on it by the 
founding of a new colony within its jurisdiction, Mr 
Godley guided the infant fortunes of Canterbury, in 
the full and entire conviction of the result which 
must one day come.' It only needs to be corrected 
in this generally just description that the motive of 
Sir George Grey's unquestionable hostility to the 
Canterbury settlement was not dislike of trouble, 
but his conscientious though narrow antipathy to 
'class colonies.' 

One of Godley's first steps was to abolish, some- 
what to Wakefield's alarm, the regulation of the 
Canterbury Association, forbidding the granting of 
pasturage leases except to purchasers of land. Of 
all New Zealand districts, Canterbury is the best 
adapted for sheep breeding, and the result of the 



312 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

change was to bring a welcome flow of capital into 
the colony. 'No day passes,' wrote Wakefield, in 
June 1850, * without my thinking of your being 
there with urgent work to do and no money. But, 
indeed, the whole deficiency of money must be treated 
as an unavoidable misfortune, unless you and I are to 
blame for having thought of founding, with twenty- 
five thousand pounds, a colony whose proper founda- 
tion on the plan adopted requires a capital of two or 
three hundred thousand. However, courage ! It is 
a good plan ; there is a good colony of people ; an 
excellent prospect on this side, of the largest and best 
emigration we ever hoped for ; and we Englishmen 
are not apt to faint.' 

Before this letter was written the vessel of the 
colony had been upon the rocks, and was only floated 
off with great difficulty, mainly by the interposition of 
Lord Lyttelton, who, Mr FitzGerald says, and the 
statement is fully borne out by Wakefield's corre- 
spondence, * brought his strong intellect and resolute 
will to rescue it from destruction.' c He threw 
himself into the affair,' says Wakefield, in an un- 
published letter to Godley, c as if his own fortune or 
life had been at stake. You and I planned, but I 
should have been disappointed and you discredited, 
if he had not taken up the work and carried it 
through by dint of personal effort and risk.' He 
became chairman of the Managing Committee in 
the spring of 1850, superseding Mr John Hutt, an 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 313 

excellent man incapacitated by advancing years and 
failing health, of whom Wakefield writes most 
characteristically : — c It is very distressing, as was 
the necessity for knocking him out of the chair : 
but if you saw your own child boring a hole in the 
bottom of a ship full of passengers, and you could not 
stop him any other way, you would shoot him, would 
you not ? I would.' The land sales, owing to the 
extra pound an acre insisted upon for Church 
purposes, disappointed expectation, and a guarantee 
to the New Zealand Company was necessary. Lord 
Lyttelton, Sir John Simeon, Lord Richard Cavendish 
and Wakefield himself each became responsible for 
£375 '•> an d hence it became possible to announce 
in April that the first body of colonists would posi- 
tively sail for their destination in the autumn. 
'Thanks,' exclaims Wakefield, 'to the heart and 
head combined of Lord Lyttelton and Simeon 
in particular ! ' This was by no means the last of 
their ventures and benefactions. The first provincial 
assembly relieved the founders of the settlement of 
^18,000 obligation. Of Wakefield's own part he 
modestly says : ' I have always regarded my signa- 
ture to the guarantee as imposing on me no real 
pecuniary liability. Poor I should have to pay only 
when Hagley, Swainston and Mr Cavendish's estate 
could not.' 

Not all the munificence of Lord Lyttelton and 
his friends, however, could render the Canterbury 



3 H BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

Association a success, but it saved the colony. The 
extra pound for religious and educational purposes 
fatally checked land sales ; not more than one-tenth 
of the two hundred thousand acres expected to be 
sold during the first year or two were actually dis- 
posed of; the Association's inability to perform its 
engagements led to the forfeiture of the- charter 
granted in 1850 ; and as soon as the colonists got 
their own way through the dissolution of the 
Association, while firmly maintaining the principle of 
the sufficient price, they fixed this at forty shillings. 
This result seemed to demonstrate that the sectarian 
system of colonization is only justifiable as a pis a Her, 
which in the case of Canterbury it actually was. 
The New Zealand Company had long abandoned 
systematic colonization, and but for the ideas of 
Wakefield and Godley, and the ecclesiastical en- 
thusiasm of Lord Lyttelton and his circle, the fair 
plains of Canterbury would have been long unoc- 
cupied, or have been monopolised by squatters from 
Australia attracted by the prospect of cheap land. 
The 'sufficient price,' though in this instance over- 
done, and the religious fervour, though narrow and 
exclusive, preserved them for the occupation of one 
of the finest bodies of emigrants ever collected, who, 
the first difficulties of settlement overcome, dotted 
them with Lyttelton, Christchurch, Timaru and 
Akaroa, and many another thriving town. 

A lively picture of the early days of the struggling 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 315 

settlement is presented in a letter to Catherine 
Torlesse from her youngest brother, Felix Wake- 
field, the author of a valuable treatise — to which, 
however, Edward Gibbon gave literary form — on the 
survey of waste lands. After many years spent in 
land-surveying in Tasmania, he returned to England 
with his family in 1847, and was promptly impressed 
by his senior into the service. He took an active part 
in the preliminary arrangements for the foundation of 
the settlement, and arrived there himself in December 
1 85 1. His letter gives a vivid picture of the natural 
features of the colony c like the South Downs on a 
gigantic scale, entirely free from timber but with 
ragged edges, and here and there some fantastic 
peaks, jagged as the volcano left them when it 
forced these islands above the sea.' This scarcity 
of timber — which the writer himself, an enthusiastic 
acclimatiser who first brought red deer and pheasants 
to New Zealand, afterwards did much to remove — 
was a great hindrance to the prosperity of the settle- 
ment, but not to be compared to the mountain which 
blocked communication between Lyttelton, the port, 
and Christchurch, the capital, an evil afterwards 
remedied by driving a tunnel. 'I bitterly regret 
not having come out instead of Captain Thomas, 
for I could have saved a mass of disappointment 
and misery by preventing a settler landing here 
until the road was passable.' The colony, Felix 
Wakefield thought, was, nothwithstanding, on the 



316 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

road to prosperity, but prosperity was a long way 
off. Pending the attainment of this goal, he antici- 
pated considerable difficulty in supporting himself 
and his young family, and looked forward to a long 
course of potato-growing as a means to this end. 
The colonists were an excellent body of men, c a 
colony of gentlemen ; and this, my deliberate opinion, 
was confirmed by Bishop Selwyn a few days since, 
when he told me that he knew of nothing like it 
in that respect. The labourers are, as a body, 
respectable, some black sheep among them, but very 
few ; for this we may thank the workers of the 
scheme in England, and the chaplain and school- 
master on board/ 'The first body of colonists,' 
says Wakefield, in a letter to Godley, 'was made 
up by infinite painstaking. Nine out of ten of 
them were nursed into becoming colonists.' Owing 
to the slowness of the land sales, the arrangements 
for churches and schools were in abeyance, and the 
voluntary system loomed darkly in the future. Mr 
Wakefield himself had just rescued two most promis- 
ing young men from Norfolk from 'slipping back 
into barbarism.' He fully agreed with Godley that 
there was too much government from home, and 
that the despatches from headquarters were unduly 
didactic. ' Except the sale of land, and sending ships 
out, everything ought to be done here by Godley 
and the Council of the colonists.' 

This feeling on Godley 's part, and, as Wakefield 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 317 

thought, the interference of Godley's future bio- 
grapher, the then emigration agent, Mr Fitz- 
Gerald, a brilliant, impulsive Irishman, meteori- 
cally conspicuous in the political history of New- 
Zealand, who had adorned the Secretary's office 
at the British Museum, and whose epistles to 
Panizzi on the subject of registration are still 
preserved with reverence in the archives of the 
printed book department, led eventually to a lament- 
able estrangement between Wakefield and Godley, 
which would not have occurred if they had not been 
on opposite sides of the world. 'What a pity,' 
Wakefield himself observes to Godley, 'that we 
cannot meet, and fight it out till one should give 
in ! I pray you to believe that I am not obstinate 
or conceited, but really desirous to think with you.' 
Not all his letters were equal models of sweet 
reasonableness, but personal explanation would have 
obliterated unfavourable impressions. ' I declare,' 
Wakefield wrote to Lord Lyttelton from New 
Zealand after Godley's departure, ' that a thorough 
reconciliation would be more agreeable to me than 
anything else I can think of.' Felix Wakefield did 
not after all devote himself to potatoes ; he went 
back to England, became director of the Army 
Works Corps in the Crimean War, and returning 
after some years to Canterbury, found that his 
property there had beome as valuable as he had 
expected it to prove ' if the colony did not collapse 



318 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

or want of a road.' The time of trial, nevertheless, 
had been severe, and it is not surprising that when 
Wakefield himself arrived at Canterbury he wrote 
to his sister, 'Extreme unpopularity met me on 
landing,' though he adds, £ It nearly all evaporated 
in a month.' When Lord Lyttelton, in 1868, came 
to view the work to which he had so largely con- 
tributed, he found it very good, especially as regarded 
the high religious and educational development 
which had been the colony's rat son d'etre. 

The letters quoted, hitherto unpublished, belong to 
the year 1851. The printed volume is one of the 
raciest of books, full of humour, designed and unde- 
signed. Nothing gave the writer more trouble than 
that indispensable appurtenance to a Church colony, 
a bishop, and anxiously did he strain his untutored 
vision to discover the precise tint of churchmanship 
which would gratify the High Churchman without 
absolutely infuriating the Low. ' Surely the Church 
comprises many earnest Churchmen who are not 
members of «the Puseyite or Tractarian party. I 
would name, for example, Gladstone and the Bishop 
of Oxford.' (The children of this world are not 
always wiser than the children of light.) Two most 
eligible prelates were thought to have been caught, 
but both managed to give the association the slip ; a 
third, to whom it had actually bound itself, proved 
so ineligible that great relief was experienced 
when he himself arrived at a similar conclusion as 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 319 

respected his intended diocese. Bishop Selwyn got 
no suffragan at Canterbury until December 1856. 
If, however, Wakefield did not shine as a theologian, 
his letters do him much credit as a practical moralist. 
The blessing promised to the peacemakers should 
have rested upon the writer of this letter to an 
eminent servant of the New Zealand Company who 
had quarrelled with another of equal distinction : — 

* Your quarrel is to me a subject of deep regret, 
both on your own account and that of the colony. 
Is it irreparable ? Men of sense never quarrel irre- 
parably. If I could imagine you exempt from the 
strange violence of colonial party feeling, I should 
earnestly counsel and beg of you to put an end to 
the quarrel. In every quarrel the man who puts 
an end to it is he who makes the first advance to 
reconciliation. To do that is only considered dis- 
graceful by petty minds : men of sense and courage 
deem it magnanimous. You have made a mistake. 
Why not retrace the step ? If you have the manly 
sense I give you credit for, you will be able to 
conquer a natural disinclination to admitting the 
mistake. Greater men than either of us have done 
this very often : very little men cannot do it. I mis- 
judge greatly if he is not a gentleman and a man 
of spirit : and if he is, he will cordially accept the 
offer of your hand. If you have, as may be natural, 
a difficulty about opening the way to peace, send 
him this letter, and wait for what he shall do. It 



320 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

would be a vast satisfaction to me were I thus to 
be the means of bringing together two men whose 
co-operation and friendship I consider of great im- 
portance to the welfare of New Zealand. If you 
make up the quarrel you will both be gainers, as 
well as the colony ; and you will be better friends, 
closer allies in the pursuit of the cause as to which 
you have -.never differed — that cause which I have 
at heart, and to which I make every sacrifice that 
it requires — than if you had never quarrelled at all.' 

The following is equally admirable in a different 
way : — 

c A new colony is a bad place for a young single 
man. To be single is contrary to the nature of a 
new colony, where the laws of society are labour, 
peace, domestic life, increase and multiply. The 
hospitality is so great that a young man who can 
make himself agreeable may live in idleness : and 
the most common lot of a single young man is to 
do this, till he becomes unfit for marriage by becom- 
ing wedded to his pipe and his bottle, not to mention 
the billiard table. Whereas, if he is nicely married, 
he has a sweet home to go to after his day's work, 
and his mind is kept tranquil enough to bear with- 
out injury the intense excitement of sharing in the 
creation of a new society. Marriage is the most 
economical : the same capital goes further with a 
wife than without one. It is her moral influence 
that both saves the money, and stimulates her 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 321 

husband's energy and prudence. Whatever may be 
the rank and capital of the young colonist — whether 
a nobleman's son worth ^10,000, or a labourer — 
let him be married for the sake of economy as well 
as peace and comfort.' 

Wakefield's stay at Malvern had been preceded 
by a residence of a few months at South Stoke, near 
Arundel, where he begged a cottage from Mr John 
Abel Smith, chiefly on account of his little friend, 
Amy Allom, whom it pained him to find wasted by 
illness upon his return from his own tour. After 
her recovery, he settled at Warwick Lodge, Redhill, 
where he gathered around him the family of his 
brother Felix, recent arrivals from Tasmania. 
Constance, the eldest daughter, now Mrs D'Arblay 
Burney, became his secretary, an office also some- 
times discharged by his nephew George, the son of 
his brother Howard, and afterwards an Indian civil 
servant. He took his brother's family with him to 
Boulogne, and when he afterwards moved to a pretty 
little outbuilding belonging to the White Hart Hotel 
at Reigate, quartered them at Woodhatch, a house 
in the neighbourhood. Mrs Burney vividly re- 
members her first impression of her uncle, only 
confirmed by subsequent acquaintance, as of one 
superior to all men she had ever seen or imagined. 
She compares him to a lion, with massive head, 
magnificent brow, sanguine complexion, somewhat 
too full habit of body, long floating hair, the token 

x 



322 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

of the enthusiast, and brilliant blue eyes, indescrib- 
ably tender when in gentle mood, but frequently 
blazing with passion or excitement. The great 
charm and impressiveness of his personality, not- 
withstanding, were incapable of definition : they lay 
in that mysterious magnetic power which excited 
feelings of intense devotion among those who came 
fully under its spell, detained unwilling listeners 
within hearing, and often subjugated them at 
last, but, by the law of compensation, frequently 
aroused violent antipathy among the unsubdued. 
The same contrast pervaded his own nature ; in 
general the kindest of men — continually performing 
generous actions, and affectionate and tender- 
hearted to a fault — he had moods of perverseness, 
and could be bitterly resentful and vindictive when 
his plans were thwarted, as by Earl Grey. He 
was especially attached to young people, and was 
always striving to educate those who came under 
his influence. He provided his niece with teachers 
in French and dancing ; and she remembers, with 
even more gratitude, his constant admonitions on 
punctuality, method, good handwriting, and the other 
valuable habits whose importance is so often undis- 
cerned by the young. He was continually contriving 
parties and picnics for the amusement of his young 
people ; but nothing was more marked in him than 
his exuberant spirits and fondness for practical joking, 
especially by alterations of apparel. He so effectually 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 323 

disguised the daughter of a friend as to impose on 
her own parents. On the whole, the impression con- 
veyed is that of an opulent nature, whose abounding 
energies must have vent, and whose love of mischief 
and talent for stratagem might easily involve the 
possessor in disagreeable adventures. These perilous 
endowments were, nevertheless, held in check by 
unrivalled sagacity and shrewdness. He seemed to 
read unuttered thoughts, to discern character by 
intuition, and to foresee the future both of individuals 
and societies. One theme on which he was fond of 
dilating was the future of the Empire under the 
British Crown. He looked forward to the Queen's 
sons ruling the chief groups of the British colonies 
as permanent viceroys— one in Canada, another in 
Australia, a third at the Cape— a vision which might 
have proved a prevision had the Imperial sentiment, 
which he did so much to create, been somewhat less 
tardy in asserting itself. He would sometimes calm 
the perturbed nerves by the anodyne of a new novel, 
and he read The Vicar of Wakefield through 
regularly once a year. Mrs Burney copied docu- 
ments and letters for him, and wrote abundantly to 
his dictation. It frequently happened to her to be 
fetched in haste, and to find her uncle closeted with 
some leading public man, such as Sir William Moles- 
worth or Mr Aglionby. She would then take down 
an oration or disquisition from his lips, which fre- 
quently reappeared in the proceedings of the House 



324 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

of Commons. She also remembers Mr Rintoul, the 
large-browed, gentle-mannered editor of the Spectator^ 
who must never be spoken to upon a Friday. The 
picture of life at Reigate would be incomplete 
without record of the enormous Talbot hounds, the 
awful delight of the neighbourhood, already men- 
tioned by Mr Allom, and of a good cat, demon- 
strative in her affection to her master. 

Another person intimately acquainted with Wake- 
field at this time was Sir Frederick Young, K.C.M.G., 
chairman and mainstay of the Royal Colonial Institute, 
who has most kindly placed his recollections of his old 
tutor in colonial politics at the writer's service : — 

' My father, the late George Frederick Young, 
M.P.,' says Sir Frederick, c was an active director of 
the New Zealand Company, and from 1839 onwards 
I found myself frequently in communication with 
Mr Wakefield. He exercised a powerful influence 
over all who came within his sphere, and especially 
over young men. His manner was striking, and 
most persuasive. There was a peculiar fascination 
about the way in which he put everything before 
one, which seldom failed to inspire confidence in 
the views which he propounded. There was a 
breadth, and power, and grasp of a subject in his 
thoughts, and a boldness in the enunciation of these 
that could not fail to draw attention, and generally 
carry conviction. In my own case he quite 
captivated me. 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 325 

c In the year 1848 the Canterbury Association was 
formed, and I was induced shortly afterwards, at Mr 
Wakefield's suggestion, to undertake the manage- 
ment of their shipping department. During 1851, 
and part of 1852, all the ships chartered by the 
Association, conveying to New Zealand nearly 
2000 colonists, were despatched under my personal 
management. During this period I was in constant 
communication with the Association at its offices, 9 
Adelphi Terrace, Strand, which brought me into 
contact with Mr Wakefield, who was daily in at- 
tendance there. 

'At this time he was living in a cottage, in a 
garden, which belonged to, and was approached from, 
the White Hart Inn at Reigate. It was a comfort- 
able and commodious little residence, with a large 
dining-room. Here he every now and then invited 
me to stay with him for a day or two. On these 
occasions our evenings were spent in discussing various 
problems connected with colonization, and with the 
details of the progress and prospects of the new 
settlement of Canterbury, and the best means to be 
adopted for promoting its success in England. Wake- 
field's brother Felix was often with him at Reigate, 
as well as Sewell of Oxford, an active member 
of the Canterbury Association. I remember one 
night, just after Sewell had retired, and Wakefield 
and I were leaving the room to do the same, 
Wakefield, candle in hand, turned to me and said : 



326 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

" What a good fellow he is ! It is a pity he is 
such a Puseyite ! " 

4 In those days Wakefield possessed a breed of 
those rare dogs, the Talbot hounds. He had two 
magnificent specimens, who were his constant com- 
panions, both in and out of doors. He was very 
fond of them, and splendid animals they were. He 
also had a strong cob, on which he used to ride 
every morning before breakfast. When I was at 
Reigate, I always accompanied him on foot, as he 
only rode at a walking pace, listening to his sage 
remarks, and taking in much that he propounded 
on the subject of colonization. He was then between 
fifty and sixty, about five feet six inches in height, 
stout and burly in figure, with a round, smooth, 
fair face, looking very like a prosperous English 
farmer. If it had not been for his unfortunate 
escapade in early life he would have attained a very 
high place in public estimation. Still, among poli- 
ticians, and especially those in any way feeling an 
interest in colonial questions, he was undoubtedly 
a great power. One day he said to me, " Young, 
I had thirty-six members of Parliament in this room 
yesterday." They had travelled down to Reigate 
to consult him on some important colonial subject 
then on the tapis. 

c His personal habits, when I knew him, were of 
the simplest kind. He was most temperate, and never 
indulged in any of the pleasures of the table. He 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 327 

rose very early and went to bed early. He lived 
on the simplest food, and scarcely touched wine.* 
He had an especial dislike to the vulgar snobbery 
of the nouveaux riches^ of whom there were many 
specimens around him. As he was a person with a 
name they desired to have him at their tables, but 
they never could succeed in getting him. One of 
them said, "If you will come I will have fish down 
from London and dine at six." " Thank you," was 
the reply, " I always dine at one, on a leg of mutton 
and a rice pudding." 

1 With all his defects, Wakefield was unquestionably 
a great man, and possessed remarkable intellectual 
qualities. He was always very kind to me, and I 
learned much from him. He never did me any harm, 
and I feel honoured and proud to have known him.' 

In 1850 and 1851, Wakefield united with Mr 
C. B. Adderley and other colonial reformers, chiefly 
of the more recent school, in founding a Colonial 
Reform Society, which materially influenced the 
grant of constitutions to the Australian Colonies 
made shortly afterwards. In 1852, his attention 
was chiefly given to a matter of the deepest 
moment to him, the New Zealand Constitution 
passed by the Derby Ministry, which terminated 
the system of personal government dominant in the 
islands since Sir George Grey had set aside the con- 

* * Of all men I ever knew,' writes Mr Allom, ' he had the greatest 
abhorrence of any person of drunken habits.' 



328 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

stitution of 1846. This state of affairs, it was 
admitted, could not last indefinitely ; and when the 
Derby Ministry succeeded to power in February 
1852, they found a constitution in the pigeon-holes 
of the Colonial Office, drafted mainly under the 
influence of Sir George Grey. The turn which 
affairs then took is circumstantially described in a 
letter from Wakefield to Godley, of 7th June 1852, 
printed in the Lyttelton Times of 30th October, 
giving a complete history of the transaction, with 
one remarkable omission. Wakefield nowhere says 
that he was himself the chief author of the 
new constitution, yet such is the explicit assertion 
of Mr C. B. Adderley, afterwards Under Secretary 
for the Colonies, and now Lord Norton, who 
says in his i Review ' of Earl Grey's work on 
Colonial Policy (1869), 'The measure was based 
on a draft I drew up under the guidance of Gibbon 
Wakefield.' Wakefield may have considered his part 
as confidential, or he may have been unwilling to 
assume responsibility for a measure which he him- 
self regarded as a compromise, and which he knew 
would prove unacceptable in many respects. It is 
the one aim of his able letter to reconcile the colonists 
to an admittedly faulty constitution, which yet con- 
tained the germ of improvement, by representing it 
as the sole alternative to no constitution at all. 

The wisdom of the advice was soon justified. At 
the end of 1852, the Conservatives having, in strict 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 329 

fulfilment of a remarkable prophecy made by Wakefield 
to Rintoul in 1849, ne ^ office just long enough to 
weld the Peelites and the Liberals into one party, 
made way for their opponents, who came into power 
laden with pledges and projects which would have 
left them no time to think of New Zealand. In 
1854 the Crimean War supervened, and domestic 
legislation ceased to interest. After all, the chief 
defect of the measure was unavoidable at the time. 
Theoretically fault might be found with the in- 
stitution of six miniature parliaments under the title 
of Provincial Councils ; but practically the settle- 
ments were so far apart and had so little in common 
that a collective management of their affairs was 
impracticable, and all that could be done was to 
confide the larger concerns of the country to a 
General Assembly, consisting of two houses, one 
nominated for life, the other elected by a very wide 
suffrage, without distinction of race. Provincial 
legislation required the assent of the Governor only, 
though, always subject to repeal by the General 
Assembly ; acts of the General Assembly might be 
disallowed by the Crown. The constitution was 
apparently less democratic than that proposed by Sir 
George Grey, in so far as all the members of the Upper 
House of the Legislative Council were to be nominated 
for life by the Crown, while by Sir George's scheme 
the majority would have been elected for a term by 
the Provincial Councils. But, as Mr Reeves points 



330 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

out, in this case c New Zealand would have a power- 
ful Senate, eclipsing altogether the Lower Chamber.' 
It improved upon the Grey project by empowering 
the colonists to regulate their land sales and civil 
list, and to vary their constitution — a liberty which 
ultimately effected the abolition of the provincial 
system. The great defect of the absence of any 
provision for the selection of the Governor's respon- 
sible advisers seems to have occurred to none, either 
of those who prepared the measure or of those by 
whom it was canvassed and criticised. 

The Bill received the royal assent on 30th June 
1852. It had undergone, to the great indignation 
of Godley, an alteration by the office of Provincial 
Superintendent being made elective ; theoretically an 
improvement, but which kept all New Zealand in 
hot water as long as Provincial Councils existed. 
Hostility to Provincial Councils in any form, em- 
bodied in the persons of Sir William Molesworth 
and Mr Robert Lowe, almost destroyed the Bill ; 
le mieux est souvent Tenneyni du blen. Its passage 
was materially assisted by two remarkable intellectual 
performances — Mr Gladstone's speech and Wake- 
field's petition in its favour. Before the session 
began, Mr Gladstone had been shown the draft 
of a projected Bill drawn at Hams, Mr Adderley's 
seat, by a committee consisting of Lord Lyttelton, 
Mr Adderley, Messrs Fox and Weld, afterwards 
New Zealand Premiers, and Wakefield. He ap- 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 331 

proved, and undertook to force the subject on 
by moving resolutions framed by himself, should 
the Colonial Office hang back. That this proved 
unnecessary was largely due, Wakefield tells Lord 
Lyttelton, to the private influence of Mr Gladstone 
with Sir John Pakington, and the advice he gave 
to the deputation to him c to be very importunate.' 
6 And so we were.' On 21st May, Mr Gladstone 
delivered a remarkable speech, a pattern of close 
argument and classic oratory, in which, while severely 
criticising some provisions of the Bill, he pleaded for 
its passage as a whole. It is only in the light of 
some of the speaker's subsequent proceedings that 
we discern the taint of separatism, the unexpressed 
conviction that a divorce between the mother country 
and the colonies would be best for both, which is 
certainly there, though in too subtle a form to have 
impaired the admiration of the orator's contemporaries. 
'The humble petition of Edward Gibbon Wake- 
field,' dated 2d June, and published in the New Zea- 
land Journal 0*1 18th June, is an equally characteristic 
performance. It would appear surprising to find 
it turning almost entirely on the question of the 
Provincial Governments, if we did not know that 
Molesworth's and Lowe's opposition to these Govern- 
ments was the rock which jeopardised the Bill. 
Wakefield certainly makes out the best possible case 
for them. c Evil happens,' he says, ' when the area 
of the colony is so large, and its means of com- 



332 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

munication so deficient, that the seat of government 
is what London has been as the seat of government 
for many remote dependencies. In such cases the 
benefits of Government — the means of getting done 
things without number which are greatly needed 
and which government alone can do — are confined 
to the seat of government and its immediate neigh- 
bourhood. The rest of the country is neglected, 
and stagnates almost without government.' This was 
true when Wakefield wrote, and he nowhere pro- 
fesses to regard Provincial Councils as a necessarily 
permanent arrangement. On the contrary, he lays 
especial stress on the clause in the Act allowing of 
its amendment from time to time, and concludes, 
6 Your Petitioner humbly prays that your Honourable 
House may be pleased to pass the Bill in question 
for the sake of its merits, and without regard to 
its obvious defects, because there is not time for 
amendment by present legislation here, whilst the 
whole measure is open to future amendment by 
legislation in the colony, subject to the approval of 
the Crown and Parliament.' 

Wakefield had always contemplated emigration 
when his work in England should be completed, 
and the establishment of a constitutional system in 
New Zealand now seemed to open to him the 
prospect of a parliamentary career. He therefore 
arranged for quitting England in the company of 
Sewell, with whom, next to Lord Lyttelton, he had 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 333 

been most closely associated during the latter days 
of the Canterbury Association ; of Captain Henslow, 
a Windsor knight, and one of his staunchest friends ; 
and of sundry canine favourites. We have seen him 
put up with a cat at Lancaster Castle, whose frowning 
portal probably bore the legend, c No dogs admitted.' 
But innate preference now reacted in the direction 
of bulldogs of the purest breed ; he further proposed 
to augment the population of Canterbury by a bull 
and a heifer. His last news to his sister, written 
within an hour of sailing from Plymouth, scene of 
the departute of the Mayflower and the Tory on 
1 2th October, is, 'The bull is nearly well. This 
morning at six, Henslow, Sewell, Bogey, Spring, 
Violet and I went off to the breakwater and walked 
there for an hour.' Four days previously he had 
written a letter to Lord Lyttelton embodying some 
of his deepest feelings and convictions : — 

'Plymouth, %th October 1852. 

c My dear Lord, — The fatigues of preparation for 
an eternal severance from England really made it im- 
possible for me to write to you with a collected mind. 
And, indeed, I had but little to say beyond offering 
to you my sincere and grateful thanks for all your 
consideration and kindness from the moment when 
Canterbury colonization brought me into relation 
with you. And this I now do with the strongest 
feeling of respect and attachment. 

'Somehow or other, nevertheless, I cannot bring 



334 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

myself to believe that I am bidding you farewell 
for ever. A pleasant dream is often in my mind 
that circumstances may yet arise that would induce 
you to represent the monarchy in New Zealand ; 
and if my life, with anything like health, shall be 
spared, I will work hard in helping to make these 
circumstances take a form of reality. They would 
consist mainly of plentiful evidence that the colony 
wishes for monarchical institutions. If it should 
prove so, and if such institutions could be estab- 
lished by the only man I know who is quite fit for 
the task, monarchy will be preserved in the southern 
world ; if not, we must be content with democratic 
republics. I am sure of this, and that there is no 
time to lose.' 

This may seem overstrained to some, but will not 
to those who remember the state of opinion between 
1850 and i860 ; who consider that veneration for 
the Sovereign could not in the nature of things be 
so strong an influence after a reign of fifteen years 
as after one of fifty ; and who reflect that the im- 
proved intercommunication, which has done so much 
to knit the Empire together, was then in its infancy. 

Two months after Wakefield's departure for New 
Zealand, Godley left its shores homeward bound, 
to die a few months before his coadjutor. Per- 
manent residence in New Zealand would probably 
have prolonged his life ; but his work at Canter- 
bury was done, and important employment awaited 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 335 

him in England. Another impressive circumstance 
signalised Wakefield's departure. Among those who 
attended his embarkation from London (29th Septem- 
ber) was Frances Wakefield, who had unjustly suf- 
fered through him for the Turner affair, and had 
ever since been estranged from him, until moved to 
reconciliation by good Mrs Allom, after scenes sur- 
passed for dramatic intensity by nothing off the stage, 
and little upon it. He knelt down and asked and 
received her forgiveness. 

The earth may open and the sea overwhelm ; 

Many the ways, the little home is one ; 
Thither the courser leads, thither the helm ; 

And at one gate <we meet ivhen all is done. 



CHAPTER XII 

WAKEFIELD IN NEW ZEALAND SIR GEORGE GREY 

THE FIRST NEW ZEALAND PARLIAMENT ILLNESS 

AND RETIREMENT FROM PUBLIC LIFE THE 

CLOSING SCENE ESTIMATE OF HIS WORK AND 

CHARACTER 

The good ship Minerva, after a voyage no less 
prosperous than that vouchsafed to her predecessor 
the Tory, cast anchor at Port Lyttelton on 2d Feb- 
ruary 1853. The unpopularity of which Wakefield 
acknowledged himself the temporary object did not 
prevent his receiving an address of thanks for his 
services in obtaining a constitution for New Zeal- 
and. In the course of a reply that touched on 
many topics, he warned the colonists against dis- 
cord, and professed himself ' desirous of nothing 
more than to see the past entirely set aside in 
favour of confiding and harmonious action between 
the Governor and the popular party in the task of 
bringing the new constitution into useful and credit- 
able operation.' The peacemaker, nevertheless, pre- 
sented himself at Wellington rather in the character 

336 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 337 

of a stormy petrel, arriving (9th March) in the 
midst of a tempest which equally prevented him from 
landing and Sir George Grey from putting to sea. 
Though beset by all the difficulties described by 
the author of c To all you Ladies now on Land,' 
Wakefield managed to indite the following epistle 
to the evasive Governor, if by any means he might 
put salt upon his tail :— 

1 Skip Minerva, 
' Wednesday morning, ()tk March. 

'My dear Grey, — In hopes that you are still 
detained by the storm which keeps me on shipboard, 
I write to you, as to an old friend, for the purpose of 
earnestly begging that you will not go away without 
seeing me. 

c Presently after landing at Canterbury, I discovered 
that there are great difficulties in the way of your 
establishing the new constitution with advantage to 
the country and credit to yourself; and I lost no 
time in doing the little which it was then possible 
for me to attempt with the view of smoothing your 
path. You will have seen my letter to Messrs Godley 
and Mathias, and you will have received from some 
Canterbury people one which the publication of that 
letter really suggested. Both were intended to assist in 
getting your past differences with the colonists laid 
aside by them, so that if you had the same desire, 
as I could not doubt for a moment, all parties might 
sincerely co-operate in giving effect to the objects of 

Y 



338 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

Parliament in granting powers of self-government to 
the colony. In the same spirit I now tender you 
my further services towards the same end ; and if 
you accept the offer, it is, of course, indispensable 
that we should meet in order to talk over the state 
of parties here and the state of opinion at home 
with regard to New Zealand and yourself, with 
which I am intimately acquainted. 

1 But let me not be misunderstood. There is no 
favour which it is possible for the Governor of New 
Zealand to bestow upon me in a personal sense, 
though he may bind me to him in eternal gratitude 
by giving real and full effect to the New Con- 
stitutional Act. My object is single and unmis- 
takable ; it is the prosperity and greatness of New 
Zealand which, come when it may, will be my 
glory, and a personal reward surpassing in value 
any that the power of Government could bestow 
upon me ; which will be your glory here and at 
home if you establish the new constitution in peace. 
I wish to help you, and can help you, in this rather 
difficult task. My experience in this sort of work — 
at least with regard to colonies — is greater than any 
other man's. If you go away without seeing me, I 
shall be very sorry, but will still do all I can to assist in 
the accomplishment of my only object. That, how- 
ever, depends mainly upon you. 

'Begging you to understand that in writing to 
you thus freely I do not forget the respect which 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 339 

is due to you officially as the Queen's representative, 
I remain, my dear Grey, yours very truly, 

c E. G. Wakefield.' 



c Will you walk into my parlour ? said the spider 
to the fly.' Sir George answers in the spirit of a 
dove corresponding with a serpent. Differences with 
the people of the country ? Difficulties ? Who can 
have told Mr Wakefield that ? Is not Sir George 
sincerely attached to them ? and does he not find 
warm friends among them wherever he goes ? It 
is true that his actions have been traduced by some 
persons (friends of Mr Wakefield's, Sir George is 
sorry to say) ; but Sir George bears no ill-will to 
those individuals, and will sincerely rejoice if he 
sees them doing anything for the public good, and 
Mr Wakefield setting them the example. As to 
meeting Mr Wakefield just then, prior engage- 
ments put it out of the question, but Sir George 
hopes to see him in about two months. 

Mr Wakefield is equally astounded. No differ- 
ences between Sir George and the colonists ! What 
an extraordinary assertion ! Why, there are more 
than Mr Wakefield could conveniently enumerate 
in one letter. What about Sir George's hos- 
tility to the Canterbury settlement ? Why are 
petitions signed for his recall ? When Mr Wake- 
field wrote the day before, he had refused to 
believe rumours that Sir George contemplated tarn- 



34-o BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

pering with the sale of waste lands, c but am now 
credibly informed that you have issued a proclama- 
tion having that effect, if it should be deemed a 
lawful measure.' It is not a lawful measure, of 
course. c If there is yet time, I would again implore 
you to reconsider your position, and to see whether 
means may not be devised of enabling you to obey 
Parliament without being troubled by anything in 
the past.' 

Thus do eminent statesmen occasionally condescend 
to piece out the lion's hide with the fox's brush. 
Wakefield knew perfectly well that Sir George was 
popular at Auckland, and Sir George was equally well 
aware that this popularity by no means extended to 
the southern districts. His adversaries, not wholly 
without ground, explained his good repute at Auck- 
land by the propinquity of that city to the loaves 
and the fishes, the staunchest allies of all governments 
everywhere ; his friends, with equal reason, thought 
that it redounded to his honour to be best liked 
where he was best known. In truth he inherited 
the disastrous legacy of Governor Hobson, who, by 
fixing the capital at Auckland when Auckland existed 
merely on paper, had engendered a soreness which 
existed until the association of the representatives of 
the various provinces in a common assembly under 
the new constitution, when it gradually died away. 
It would have been better if Sir George Grey had 
not prolonged this unfortunate state of things by 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 341 

his virtual refusal to convoke a General Assembly, 
although he did convene the Provincial Councils. 
This can only be accounted for by a determination 
to retain power in his own hands during the remainder 
of his administration. He quitted New Zealand at 
the end of 1853, to assume the government of the 
Cape, little foreseeing his second governorship and 
yet another important part reserved for him to per- 
form in New Zealand politics long after his trouble- 
some antagonist should be laid in the grave. 

Wakefield, meanwhile, elated by the flattering 
address he received on landing at Wellington, and by 
the apparent recovery of his health in New Zealand 
air, proceeded to dig this grave for himself by the 
eagerness with which he rushed into politics. • I am 
going to throw myself upon the people,' he wrote to 
Lord Lyttelton. Far better for length of days and 
ultimate happiness if he had stood aloof from party 
strife, and become, as he might have in time, the 
acknowledged arbiter in public questions and moderator 
of political dissensions. ' Greater earthly reward,' Mr 
W. R. Greg nobly says in his essay on Sir Robert 
Peel, c God out of all the riches of his boundless 
treasury has not to bestow.' It must be admitted, 
however, that Sir George Grey's land regulations 
were a challenge to Wakefield which he could not 
well decline, nor under any circumstances was he 
the man to play the part of a Peel. To his sanguine, 
impulsive temperament political excitement had the 



342 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

zest of an open-air game. ' You will see,' he writes 
to his sister, 'what a turmoil our politics are in. 
Though up to my eyes in it, I feel none the worse.' 
On this Mr Allom comments : — 

' Much of this turmoil had been carefully arranged 
previously. I look upon this period as the most 
remarkable period of E. G. W.'s connection with 
New Zealand ; the advent of men like Godley, 
Sewell and FitzGerald ; the presence of the wily Sir 
George Grey ; and finally the arrival of E. G. W. 
himself could not fail to produce a great political 
eruption. The result could be foreseen. I believe 
E. G. W. was mainly instrumental in bringing it 
about, and actually gloried in it quite as much as the 
schoolboy enjoys the bonfire he has made.' 

Wakefield certainly thought himself the man for 
the time and place. After telling his sister (29th 
April) that he has attended a public meeting and 
'actually spouted for an hour and a half, as I have 
not done since 1843 m Canadian House of Assembly,' 
he adds : — 

'There is an immense task for me to get through, 
in consequence of the rotten state of public matters. 
But all looks well for the future, so far as the future 
may be affected by my obtaining an influence in the 
country greater than that of anybody else. Indeed, 
this is coming about already, by means of straight- 
forwardness and assiduity. I work like a horse, much 
aided by Jerningham, who is a faithful and diligent 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 343 

lieutenant. If, as seems probable, he should be able 
to conquer some colonial habits, he will be a leading 
person in this country. I mean nothing bad in the 
really bad sense, only habits of desultory application 
under inordinate excitement only, and of localism 
with respect to thought, as well as somewhat of a 
turn for wrangling. He is very sociable, and is now 
living entirely with me.' 

Unfortunately poor Jerningham could not shake off 
the most pernicious of all c colonial habits,' and what 
might have been a very brilliant career terminated in 
disappointment. 

Meanwhile, the drama of New Zealand politics 
remained in a condition of rehearsal from the obstinate 
refusal of Sir George Grey to provide it with a stage. 
Until the General Assembly should meet, politics 
could be merely local. Far more interest attaches to 
the remarkable letter in which Wakefield communi- 
cates his impressions of the colony to his old friend 
Rintoul — so copious that retrenchment is necessary 
on the ground of space : — 

C I am bursting with fulness of matter for writing 
to you. It must come out anyhow. In the first 
place, the country physically far surpasses my expecta- 
tions. Not that it is different, generally, from my 
notions of it before touching the soil, but actual 
familiarity with particulars has made the old impres- 
sions more distinct. The climate is to my feelings 
delicious, though far from resembling what we call a 



344 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

delicious climate in Europe, such as that of Naples in 
winter. Its principal characteristic is some invigorat- 
ing property which affects man and beast equally, so 
that both horse and rider are always in good spirits. 
I have not had since we entered Port Lyttelton a 
moment of that depression and feebleness which used 
to make me such a cripple at home. There is 
abundance of wind, and, this year, superabundance of 
rain, but the roughest weather causes no uneasiness, 
and the fine weather is glorious. Perhaps it is from 
having been so long ill that I value so much the 
constant feeling of health which this climate produces. 
Henslow resembles me in this, the poor, crawling, 
sallow invalid has become almost jolly, and is afraid to 
brag of his happy feelings lest it should provoke a 
change back to the old miseries. But fine health is 
general in old and young. All the Creole children are 
plump and ruddy when not suffering from some 
particular complaint. I have not seen an exception, 
and you know how I examine the children and dogs 
wherever I may be. One of my dogs — the blood- 
hound, Bogey — having lost his mother in childbirth, 
and been suckled by a poor little wet-nurse, had a 
bad constitution, and was always ailing at home, the 
voyage also disagreed with him, and on landing he 
was like a rake in a bag ; he is now in the rudest 
and handsomest health. ... I could give you 
plenty of facts like these, but must go on to other 
matters. 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 345 

The scenery is peculiar, though greatly varied. 
Upon the whole I think it most beautiful. But there 
are all sorts — the grand, the beautiful, and the pleasant ; 
not even the centre of the great Canterbury Plain 
— an immense dead level in appearance — is ugly, 
because there are always in sight fine mountains, 
appearing, from the singular clearness of the atmo- 
sphere, to be near at hand. This district, Welling- 
ton, has great variety, though near the town, except- 
ing the Hutt Valley, it is hilly and mountainous. 
Socially (I can speak from personal observation only 
of Canterbury and Wellington) there is much to like, 
and much to dislike. The newest comers from 
England are the best, on the whole, more especially 
the picked materials with which Canterbury was 
founded. At Canterbury I could have fancied myself 
in England, except for the hard-working industry of 
the upper classes and the luxurious independence of 
the common people. The upper classes are very 
hospitable, and very deficient in the pride of purse or 
mere station, and the common people are remarkably 
honest. Their entire independence is not disagreeable 
to me, who am accustomed to America, and like it. 
There is absolutely no servility. I think there is no 
lack of either real respect for what deserves it, or real 
politeness, though the mere outward manner of the 
common people seems rudely independent to such as 
have been always used to the hypocritical servility of 
tradespeople and lacqueys at home. I get on famously 



34-6 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

with the " unwashed," and like them. Sewell, as yet 
incapable of understanding them, thinks them rude 
and disagreeable. His Oxford and Isle of Wight 
habits of thought are shocked by the democratic ways 
of a carpenter here, who speaks of him as Sewell 
without the Mr, and calls a brother carpenter ' Mister 
Smith.' There is an intense jealousy of new-comers ; 
a state of feeling which always takes possession of 
young colonies, and holds possession of them till they 
begin to grow old. For every new-comer probably 
comes to be the competitor or rival of somebody. 
Bowler has been quite upset by the shock of meeting 
this strong colonial sentiment, and it gives Sewell the 
stomach-ache. I am happily able to laugh at it. 
Indeed, though some are exceedingly jealous of me — 
those, that is, who fancy that I may trench upon their 
positions as political leaders — I must say the generality 
of colonists, and more particularly the older ones, 
behave very kindly to me, and seem to think that 
jealousy of me would be misplaced. But my case is 
exceptional on account of c Auld lang syne.' The 
jealousy of Sewell is too strong to be at all concealed. 
Just what I told him would happen has come about 
more suddenly than I could expect. His plunge into 
public affairs has made his talents known, and here 
those talents are perfectly unrivalled. Consequently 
he is already feared and respected as well as — hated. 
Colonial jealousy of the new-comer passes away in 
time, and soon in proportion as the new-comer soon 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 347 

takes root in the land. When he is fairly planted, he 
in his turn becomes jealous of other new-comers. 

But the worst feature, I think, of this colonial 
society is a general narrow-mindedness. Everybody's 
ideas seem to be localised in his own part of the 
country. I have not met with one person who is as 
well acquainted as I am myself with New Zealand in 
general. Thought abstract from the individual seems 
totally absent. The interests and amusements of each 
person are the only subjects of his thoughts. This is 
partly owing to the want of intercommunication 
among the settlements, which are, and will be, until 
they get local steam navigation, as much cut off from 
each other as if separated by a thousand miles of ocean, 
so that each community is naturally as small in its 
ideas as in its numbers ; but the evil in question 
has another cause, which is the cause of many more 
evils, namely, the total absence of popular power and 
responsibility. The total want of political liberty 
produces a stagnant frame of mind, except as regards 
getting money or spending it. I can't find one 
person who has it in his head to contemplate the 
prosperity and greatness of this country ; not one who 
really sympathises with my dreams of the last fifteen 
years. Some say that they do, and believe what they 
say, but a bat could see that they do not really. It is 
a miserable state of things, and you will think I must 
be very unhappy. But I am not so at all. On the 
contrary, I am sure that there is a good foundation to 



348 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

work upon in the best set of colonists that have ever 
left England in modern times ; that poverty and crime 
(crime in the old country sense) are impossible ; that 
the country is unrivalled in climate and productiveness ; 
and that the mind of the people will be changed by the 
coming responsibilities of political power. Only there 
is heavy work for me, if I can but keep health for doing 
it. At present I am not in the least down-hearted.' 

Mr Allom, to whom we are indebted for a copy 
of this invaluable letter, comments upon it as 
follows : — 

' This letter, written little more than two months 
after his arrival in the colony, is an illustration of 
the difference between theory and practice in matters 
colonial, as in all others. Here we have the views 
of the great thinker and theorist when confronted 
by actual facts. We see by the manner in which 
he opens his heart to Rintoul, his old friend and 
fellow-labourer, how delighted he is with the country 
and the climate. But I think there is apparent 
throughout the letter a slight shade of disappointment. 
It is characteristic of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, 
that sometimes his own thoughts are expressed as 
those of others. In this way be refers to the 
sentiments of Sewell and Bowler, which I believe 
were equally his own. He seems to have quite 
understood the sturdy and independent attitude of 
the newly-arrived labourer towards his capitalist 
employer, and probably he recognised the position 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 349 

as a foreshadowing, in some degree, of those great 
political changes which in more recent years have 
become so marked a feature of our colonial democracy. 
It is interesting to note his remarks about the jealousy 
of Sewell being too strong to be concealed, and of 
Sewell's unrivalled abilities which have already made 
him feared and respected as well as — hated. I 
cannot help thinking that these references to Sewell 
apply quite as much to himself. 

'In striving, at this time, to obtain for the people 
greater political power under the new constitution, 
I cannot believe that he thought it would be for 
their good that the " common people " should acquire 
the almost unlimited political power which they have 
since attained.' 

The convocation of provincial councils before the 
election of a General Assembly undoubtedly worked 
ill for the colony. c Superintendents and councils,' 
says Mr Gisborne, ' unchecked, without experience, 
and revelling in political freedom, seemed at first as 
if too much license had made them mad. But there 
was this method in their madness : they strove to 
get into their hands as much power as they possibly 
could.' The infinite divisibility of the public revenue 
became an article of faith. For a long time the 
provincial institutions maintained their ground as 
a geographical necessity, but at length disappeared — 
a result which Mr Gisborne thinks need not have 
come to pass if they had been from the first har- 



35 = BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

moniouslv co-ordinated with the General Assembly. 
This body, to which Wakeueid was - turned as 
Member for :he Hurt district, in the province of 
Wellington, commenced its career under Colonel 
Wynyard, commander of the troops, who ex officio 
occupied Sir George Grev's post in the character 
of Acting-Governor, under very curious conditions. 
There was no responsible Ministry, all posts in the 
administration being held by officials holding per- 
manent appointments from the Crown. There was, 
consequently, no front bench, and no Opposition 
technically, though, practically, all the House was 
Opposition. The principal Member of the Govern- 
ment was Speaker of the Upper House, and therefore 
speechless. Bv an oversight of the draftsman, the 
Lower House had no power of stopping the supplies, 
and was thus unable to control the Government. 
It was impossible, however, to delay the assembling 
of the General Legislature any longer, and Colonel 
Wynyard opened it on 27th Mav 1854, with an address 
assuredly not composed by the gallant o nicer from 
whom it professedlv emanated, and which seems to 
bear traces of Wakefield's pen. The mcs: 
able feature was the declaration that the Pro- 
vincial Councils needed much watching, and that 
'it will rest with the General Assembly of these 
islands whether New Zealand shall become one 
2reat nation, exercising a commanding influence in 
the Southern Seas, or a collection of insignificant, 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 351 

divided and powerless petty states.' Apart from the 
evidence of style, so many of the ablest men in New 
Zealand were interested in propelling the provinces into 
virtual independence, that it mav be doubted whether 
anyone else who could have said this so well would 
have said it at all. The point should be remembered 
in connection with Wakefield's subsequent action. 

It is probable that his jiext important step was 
preconcerted with the Governor, for nothing else 
could have given constitutional government a start. 
It was to move c That amongst the objects which 
the House desires to see accomplished without 
delay, the most important is the establishment of 
ministerial responsibility in the conduct of legislative 
and executive proceedings by the Governor.' ' The 
subject,' says Mr Swainson, then Attorney-General, 
and the chief contemporary authority for these 
transactions, c was discussed in a debate of three days' 
continuance, if debate it may be called in which no 
difference of opinion was expressed.' The resolution 
was carried with virtual unanimity, but the difficultv 
was how to carry it into effect, the existing officials 
holding patent appointments under the Crown. It 
was at length agreed that the Colonial Secretary, 
the Colonial Treasurer and the Attorney-General 
should remain in their offices * until they could 
with propriety retire,' and that four Members or" 
the Assembly, Messrs FitzGerald, Sewell, Weld and 
Bartley, should be added to the E: .- Council, 



352 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

charged with the preparation of parliamentary business, 
and the carrying of it through the House. Nothing 
less could be done if constitutional government was 
not to become a farce, but subsequent events showed 
that the country was not really much excited upon 
the subject. ' The Auckland members, in their 
humility, acknowledged that Mr Wakefield had 
taught them what responsible government was.' 

Wakefield's first feelings were of wild, enthusiastic 
exultation. With all his shrewdness, no one was 
more liable to be carried into extravagance under the 
influence of excitement : — 

'Auckland, 14M June 1854. 

' My dear Catherine, — By the newspapers which 
I send with this you will see that New Zealand has 
undergone neither more nor less than a revolution. 
Do not be alarmed ; the change, though enormous, 
has been peaceful, and will be very conservative in 
its results. The mutilated constitution has been 
healed, and brought into vigorous action by the 
friendly concert of pro-Governor Wynyard and the 
House of Representatives. Mr Sewell is a Cabinet 
Minister, as I might also have been had I pleased. 
You will open your eyes and ask what all this means. 
It means (confining myself to what you will most 
care about) that after trouble and annoyance, and 
disappointment and suffering without end, I am as 
happy as anyone can be in this world, having a 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 353 

full realisation of what I have hoped and longed 
and striven for during so many years. The only 
drawback is a kind of apprehension arising from 
the greatness and suddenness of the success. My 
health and strength are wonderful. The greater 
the danger, the louder the raging of the storm, 
the more important the crisis, and the larger my 
own share of responsibility and labour, the more 
I have been capable of doing whatever I wished to 
do. Neither effort nor the highest excitement have 
disturbed or fatigued me. I have been as cool as 
you would wish, and have slept like a pig. This 
is all about myself, but you will like it the better 
for that. I write in haste to catch a Sydney mail, 
and my hands are full of work. God bless you 
both. Kind love to all. — Ever your most affec- 
tionate < E. G. W.' 

A letter to Lord Lyttelton, written the same 
day, reiterates much of the above, indulges in specula- 
tions, probably visionary, as to what the provinces 
might have done if responsible government had not 
been conceded, and declares that a little child might 
guide the New Zealand representatives in the right 
way. Probably the little one did not present himself, 
and the legislators, needing to be led somewhere, fol- 
lowed other guidance, for when Parliament met again, 
after a short recess, things had manifestly altered for 
the worse. Mistrust and ill-will reigned universally, 

z 



354 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

nobody could quite tell why. Mr Brittan said at 
Canterbury that it all arose from the new Ministers 
having held a conclave from which Wakefield was 
excluded. If this is true they were to blame for 
having ignored him, and he was equally to blame for 
having retaliated ; but no intrigues of his could have 
produced the occurrence which actually led to the 
break up of the Ministry, which seems to suggest 
the prosaic explanation that there were not places 
enough for the place-hunters, and that the only accept- 
able programme would have been quot homines^ tot 
portfolios. The new Executive Ministers demanded 
that the three old officials who had been associated 
with them under the compromise of June should 
resign, pleading private understandings to this effect, 
too private to be capable of proof. The officials 
declined to budge. Mr FitzGerald and his colleagues, 
expecting to coerce the Governor, tendered their own 
resignations. The Governor, to their dismay, sent 
for Wakefield, who advised him — to all appearance 
rightly — that he had no power to dismiss officials 
holding their posts by direct appointment from the 
Crown. The officials professed their readiness to give 
up their places whenever His Excellency should ask 
for them, but not till then — and Wakefield advised 
him not to ask. It is easy to imagine the odium he 
thus incurred with those whom he prevented from — 

Fulfilling the prophecies 
By only just changing the holders of offices. 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 355 

c Mr Wakefield,' remarks Mr Swainson, c was much 
too formidable to be lightly made into an enemy ; and 
so long as he continued to be simply a member of the 
House the true feelings of a large portion of the mem- 
bers towards him were concealed by a cloak of reserve ; 
but no sooner was he seen in a position of influence than 
all reserve was thrown aside. Courted, fawned upon, and 
flattered, but scarcely ever trusted at the commence- 
ment of the session, Mr Wakefield was now assailed 
in the House in the most violent and opprobrious 
language, transgressing even the license of colonial 
debate.' It is a common misadventure in politics to 
be hoist with one's own petard ; and many a man 
besides Wakefield has found the fulfilment of his hopes 
the disappointment of his expectations. The legis- 
lators he had struggled so hard to bring together, 
lately so anxious to get rid of the permanent officials, 
petitioned the Governor to consult them instead of 
his irresponsible adviser, and was informed that they 
always had been consulted. A long message from the 
Governor came down, and was being read by the 
clerk, when it was discovered that a page was missing. 
Wakefield coolly pulled a duplicate from his pocket and 
offered to supply the omission, which produced a scene 
only to be paralleled by that which occurred a few days 
later when the House filled up the interval between read- 
ing a message from the Governor threatening and a 
second message decreeing their prorogation by passing 
fierce resolutions, the second message meanwhile lying 



356 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

unread upon the table. Left, as he thought, with 
a clear stage, Wakefield tried to form a new Executive, 
but found himself unexpectedly checkmated by Mr 
Swainson, the Attorney-General, a sedate, astute 
lawyer, no great legislator, but an excellent drafts- 
man of acts under the inspiration of Chief Justice 
Martin, who virtually expressed the opinion that the 
permanent officials could get on very well without the 
aid of coadjutors from the Assembly, or any such 
impertinences. Wakefield's minute of his interview 
with Mr Swainson is printed in the latter's book on 
New Zealand, and is one of the most curious and 
entertaining productions of his pen. His Excellency 
taking Mr Swainson's view, Wakefield ' at once 
retired from the position of temporary adviser, receiving 
the grateful acknowledgments of the Acting-Governor 
for the zeal and ability with which his services had 
been rendered.' These were not unmerited, for during 
the prorogation the Opposition entirely collapsed, 
partly from want of support in the country, and partly 
from the consideration touchingly set forth in their 
address to the Governor, c that a large proportion of 
the Members of the Legislature have been detained 
from home upwards of five months, and will be 
obliged to return by the next steamer ' — minus their 
salaries, they might have added, unless they dutifully 
voted the Estimates. They did vote them, and the 
Parliament from which so much had been expected 
broke up amid universal dissatisfaction : Wakefield 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 357 

finding himself ostracised where he had expected to 
rule, Mr FitzGerald ■ and his friends having thrown 
away places which they might very well have kept, 
and even the victorious officials feeling the sword of 
Damocles suspended over them. 

New Zealanders have naturally felt ashamed of the 
fiasco of their first essay in Parliamentary Government, 
and have generally agreed to visit their mortification 
upon Wakefield, who seems, however, to have been 
mainly the victim of circumstances. He could neither 
help the jealousy with which he was regarded by his 
fellow-legislators, nor the quarrel between the old and 
new officials ; nor could he prevent the political 
suicide of the Ministry, or refuse his advice to the 
Governor when called upon, or honestly give any 
other advice than he did, or control Mr Swainson 
when circumstances had made that gentleman master 
of the situation. His chief faults were to have par- 
ticipated, near the end of the session, in an attempt to 
set up an abortive Ministry, and to have inspired it, 
though ostensibly keeping aloof, with a scheme for the 
restriction of Provincial Councils, which under the 
circumstances was justly considered wild and uncon- 
stitutional. Yet it was rather unseasonable than 
unsound. The perception of the necessity for limit- 

1 Wakefield afterwards penned an unflattering character of Mr Fitz- 
Gerald, one of the most vigorous pieces of invective in the language ; 
much better unwritten, nevertheless. It is highly to Mr FitzGerald's 
honour to have in after years spoken of his assailant as he does in his 
memoir of Godley. 



358 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

ing the encroachments of these bodies runs like a 
thread through all his political action of this period ; 
and his foresight was vindicated when by-and-by the 
question arose * whether,' in Mr Gisborne's words 
* the provincial institutions were not, under the guise 
of local self-government, gradually absorbing general 
government, and tending, sooner or later, to the 
division of New Zealand into federal states.' One 
curious result of the campaign was to make Wakefield 
popular in Auckland, which he had always disparaged, 
and unpopular in the colonies which he had founded 
himself. 

Wakefield's great mistake, however, was to have 
taken any part in politics except as a writer. The 
buoyant health of which he speaks in his letter to his 
sister was the effect of an unnatural stimulus, and was 
to be expiated by a reaction which secluded him from 
the world. The mortifying incidents of the session 
must have preyed upon his spirit, and the scenes 
through which he had passed might have tried stronger 
constitutions than that of an invalid barely recovered 
from paralysis of the brain. ' What he went through 
at Auckland,' his brother Daniel wrote, ' Chief Justice 
Martin tells me, was enough to break up the constitu- 
tion of a very strong man. Constant labour in plan- 
ning measures in the Assembly, writing, and above 
all, talking against a mob of opponents was too much 
for one in but feeble health.' In addition to this he 
had taken a large share in the Committee work of the 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 359 

House. The ultimate breakdown is thus described in 
a letter from his son to Catherine Torlesse : — ■ 

'Wellington, %th May 1855. 

'. . . About the first week in December last he 
attended a meeting of his constitutents in the Hutt 
Valley, and spoke with great earnestness and vigour 
for five hours consecutively in a densely-crowded 
room. In order, I suppose, to get away from the 
noise and excitement consequent on such a political 
meeting, he drove home in an open chaise, nine 
miles in the face of a cold, south-easterly gale, at 
two o'clock in the morning. Although he began 
to feel ill, he accepted an invitation a day or two 
afterwards to dine with the members of an Odd- 
fellows' Lodge in this town, and sat in a hot room 
with an open window at his back. 1 The next day 
he was attacked with rheumatic fever, and suffered 
acute pain. This turned, I believe, into neuralgia, 
every nerve in his body being affected. At first he 
was attended by Dr Prendergast, but fell back upon 
complete quiet of mind and body with an occasional 
"lamp." For a long time he would let no one 
know how ill he was, and would see no one. But 
he then wrote to me at Canterbury, asking me to come 
to him. I arrived about the first week in January. 
I found the pains were going off, but that he was 

1 It will be remembered that December is the height of summer in 
New Zealand. 



360 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

dreadfully weak, very nervous, and at times despond- 
ing, with no appetite, and irregular circulation. I 
remonstrated against the rejection of the drug system 
without substituting his own panacea of "packing," 
in which he used to have such faith. But he always 
replies that he feels a presentiment that the effort 
would be too much for him, that he has an idea 
it would choke him, and so on. So that he 
positively does nothing but rest, opens no letters, 
reads no local papers, indeed, tries to think about 
nothing on which his thoughts can have any influ- 
ence. 1 To a certain degree I think this is right. 
He has sadly overtasked both his bodily and his 
mental powers during the past two years, and com- 
plete rest for the brain as well as the body will, I 
have no doubt, do much to restore him in course 
of time. My being here, of course, saves him from 
attending to any business, public or private, and I 
pass an hour or two with him nearly every day. I 
hope and believe him to be out of all danger for 
the present, but his recovery must necessarily be 
slow and tedious, and perhaps never perfect. My 
great desire is to see him strong enough to get a 
change of air, such as up to Charles's sheep station 
at Rangiora, or perhaps to Sydney, and I also trust 
that he may make up his mind to give up the idea of 
any more active political labour. But I confess to a 

1 * The surest mark of the intensity of suffering is the limitation of 
the sufferer's desires to absolute repose.' — Anthony Trollope. 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 361 

dread lest, as soon as he feels at all strong, he should 
again endeavour, by his own efforts in public life, to 
arrest the progress of what he may think evil in the 
colony. At present he cannot walk across his room. 

1 1 have had great satisfaction in being able to 
agree with him thoroughly and unreservedly in all 
that he has done, and of supporting his policy by 
every effort in my power. Although in a minority 
at first, his views are daily gaining strength, and I 
rejoice to think that but a few years will elapse 
before it will be generally acknowledged that a true 
and far-seeing patriotism has alone dictated all his 
public policy. — Your affectionate nephew, 

C E. Jerningham Wakefield.' 

Wakefield could never again have appeared upon 
a platform, but some thought that his pen would 
still have been active if he could have felt more 
confidence in the political future of his son. This 
may be doubted, the intellectual faculties were not 
in themselves impaired, but he appeared to feel that 
his grasp upon them had become uncertain, and 
that a slight shock might dissolve it altogether. He 
seemed at first to take refuge in absolute silence, 
calling to mind, perhaps, the days in Lancaster 
Castle, when he had boasted what good company 
he could find in his own self. But this was not 
to be ; as formerly in Newgate, sunshine stole into 
the shady place in the person of a little girl. His 



362 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

niece Alice, daughter of his brother Daniel, and 
afterwards, as Mrs Harold Freeman, daughter-in-law 
of the illustrious historian, has graced the writer's 
pages with her affecting reminiscences of this tender 
sequel to a stormy life. 

* The first recollection that I have of my uncle 
Edward Gibbon is the night of the great earthquake 
at Wellington. 1 I was carried out of my bed, and 
found myself amongst a number of frightened people 
who had come from the houses round, and were 
all passing the night out of doors. In the middle 
of the group was my uncle seated in an arm-chair, 
and he was of much interest to me, for, though we 
lived in the same house, I do not recall having seen 
him before. My father and mother had left their 
home in Wellington Terrace and come to live 
with him at his house in the Timahori Road. 2 My 
father, who was always devoted to his brother, had 
thrown up his appointment as Attorney-General on 
account of disagreements between Sir George Grey 
and my uncle. At the earthquake my uncle's atten- 
tion was drawn to me, and from that time to his 
death in 1862 I was a great deal with him. The 

1 This alarming convulsion is graphically described in Thomson's 
Story cf New Zealand, vol. ii. pp. 231-233. * For fourteen hours the 
town trembled like a shaken jelly.' The site was permanently raised 
from three to six feet, and an intended dock is now a pleasure garden. 

2 This house had been exported from England, and had been pre- 
viously occupied by Mr Eyre, celebrated as an Australian explorer and as 
Governor of Jamaica, at that time Lieutenant-Governor under Sir 
George Grey. 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 363 

feelings of love and admiration that I had for him 
it is impossible to describe ; my greatest pleasure 
was to be in his company ; his slightest wish was 
my law, at any sacrifice of my own pleasure. It 
is only fair to my mother to say that she encouraged 
this devotion to my uncle, feeling that in his soli- 
tary life, often seeing no one but his man-servant 
William Schmidt and myself, I was the only pleasure 
that was left to him. All was done for me accord- 
ing to my uncle's views of making a child strong. 
I had a cold bath in the morning, then walked with 
him for half an hour before breakfast, then had 
porridge. William Schmidt was a native of Schles- 
wig Holstein, who liked to call himself a Dane. 
He had been a sailor aboard the ship my uncle 
came out in, and broke his leg by a fall from the 
mast. My uncle visited him in the hospital at 
Wellington, and asked him if he would like to be- 
come his servant instead of returning to the life of 
a sailor. William proved most faithful ; he was 
always at hand, and looked upon his master with 
the greatest affection and respect. My uncle gave 
him some land in Christchurch, and after his death 
William became quite a rich man. He was very 
fond of carpentering, and made very pretty boxes 
and frames out of the honeysuckle and other fine 
New Zealand woods. In his workshop I passed 
many hours with my uncle. We walked up and 
down a very small space, our companions, besides 



364 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

William, being " Powder " and " Blucher," two bull 
dogs considered very fierce, but perfectly gentle 
with us. 

c I feel convinced that I have never met any man 
with the power that E. G. Wakefield had, and I have 
never come across anyone who cared for young 
people and their improvement in the way that he 
did. I used to read books with my mother, and 
then repeat them chapter by chapter to my uncle. 
I read the whole of the Waverley Novels through 
twice over in this way, except Castle Dangerous and 
Count Robert of Paris, which he did not think worth 
my reading ; his favourites were Guy Mannering, Rob 
Roy, Waverley, and Old Mortality. Repeating them 
like this, and listening to my uncle's comments was, 
I may say, a good education, and I can turn now with 
pleasure to Walter Scott when I do not care to read 
a modern novel. I also learned the whole of the 
Lady of the Lake, not one line was allowed to be 
missed, and in reading I was carefully taught never 
to skip or look on. I obeyed the slightest wish my 
uncle ever expressed, and never cared to do anything 
but what he approved. Two trials I remember, 
having to choose between some rather dry travels in 
Japan and The Daisy Chain. " Which would you 
like me to read ? " said I, and on being told The 
Travels, gave up The Daisy Chain. On another 
occasion he told me I was too old to play with dolls, 
and I never played with a doll after that day. My 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 365 

uncle was not able to bear any noise, so that we 
never went on his side of the house, or used the 
rooms nearest to him : neither did my little play- 
fellows come to visit me. I went to see them and 
they would say, "Do you not dislike having to go 
back every day at four to walk with your uncle ? " 
I know the very question astonished me, and I 
warmly replied there was nothing else I enjoyed so 
much. I do not remember my uncle seeing any 
visitors but a friend to whom he used to give lessons 
in the open air to cure his stammering, and another 
who lent him books on the Millennium. He saw my 
mother and Jerningham occasionally. I have a 
prayer book with his name in his own writing, and 
he once said that he should have gone to church, 
only from fear of disturbing people with his breathing 
from asthma. Colonel Palmer of Nazing 1 told me 
that he should always remember my uncle rather 
offending some Americans in conversation, and 
that when he saw this was the case he said, " All 
this does not matter ; we speak the same language 
and are brothers ; if we were in any trouble it is to 
you that we should look for help, and I know that 
you would give it." The Americans after this were 
quite content. 

'There were one or two breaks in this complete 
seclusion. My father died when I was eight years 

1 The same gentleman whom we have seen endeavouring to raise a 
monument to Wakefield in South Australia. 



366 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

old, and then my uncle was very kind to my mother, 
and gave directions about his funeral. At another 
time there was an election in which he was interested; 
our walks then were beyond our own gates, and I 
listened to my uncle persuading a man to vote, saying 
it was the duty of every man to vote ; that, ill though 
he was, he would rather be carried to the poll in his 
bed than not give his vote. Another time I heard 
a long conversation which I am sure related to his 
first meeting with Lord Durham. It must have 
been about this time that I persuaded my uncle to 
come with me to feed an old white horse in a field near 
us, and he said, " Why, that is quiet enough for even 
me to ride," and for some time he had this horse 
to ride very slowly upon. 1 One morning he sur- 
prised us by going ofF very early and being photo- 
graphed ; this is the photograph after which the 
bust by Durham in the Colonial Office was executed. 
I think that his mind was in full vigour up to the last, 
but his bodily health had failed, and he could no longer 
struggle with the world. 

c Many things that my uncle said come back into 
my mind with the memory of the impressive way in 
which he said everything. Once when my mother 
was very anxious about something he said, " Throw it 
aside, forget. I should have been in a lunatic asylum 
before now if I had not been able to put a subject out 

1 What a subject for a picture — the worn-out horse, the worn-out 
statesman, and the blooming little girl ! 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 367 

of my mind." Then he would say, " It is a blessing 
that women love needlework ; it has the same sooth- 
ing effect upon their minds that a pipe has upon 
men's." He told us once that years ago a doctor 
had told him that he ought to become a monk of 
La Trappe, talking was so bad for him ; the last 
years of his life he might almost have belonged to 
this order. His mother was, I am sure, often in 
his thoughts, for he used to look at me and say, 
"Alice, I believe that you are growing like my 
mother," and when I wanted to name my favourite 
parrot he said, " Call it Susan ; it was my mother's 
name." I never heard him mention his wife or 
Nina ; I think he was too fond of them to talk 
about them. I remember his describing his residence 
in Italy when the news of the death of Princess 
Charlotte came to the Embassy, and the grief of the 
men was so great that they burst into tears. 

' We moved from the Timahori Road to Welling- 
ton Terrace. Shortly afterwards the two bull dogs 
got out into the road and began fighting with another 
dog. William went out to separate them, and 
Blucher flew at him and bit him in the face. I 
carried of? Powder, and shut him up in the stable. 
William went to my uncle and asked permission to 
have both the dogs shot. This was allowed, to my 
great grief; and my mother said she was sure he 
must be feeling much worse to have consented. No 
doubt the strong will had given in, and the end came 



368 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

very soon after. One night, 16th May 1862, he woke 
up William, who slept in his room, with the words, 
"William, this is death." 1 William woke up my 
mother and myself; we hurried to the room. My 
uncle held my hand with a tight clasp, and looked 
in my face with an expression that I shall never 
forget ; he could not speak. When Jerningham 
entered the room in answer to a hasty summons, 
his father struggled hard to speak, but nothing more 
than the name Jerningham was distinguished. 

c I do not recollect who came to the funeral. I 
know that two Maoris came to follow after the 
funeral had started. He was laid by the side of two 
brothers, who had been devotedly attached to him, 
Colonel Wakefield and my father, also my sister ; the 
four graves are close together. 

c On one occasion my uncle spoke before me with 
bitterness of the quick way in which people were 
forgotten after death, and I burst forth with the 
assurance that I should never forget him. This 
promise I have certainly kept, and I think that, child 
though I was, I felt the power of his mind, the 
fascination of his manners, tone and general bearing. 
All his precepts were good, and likely to influence 
youth for good. Nothing that I have been able to 
write does justice to his memory.' 

Thus the powerful mind and persuasive tongue that 
had given so mighty an impulse to the practice, and 

1 The dying exclamation of George the Fourth. 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 369 

such new life to the theory of colonization, that had 
perplexed Ministries with fear of change at home, 
and profoundly modified relations between the mother 
country and her children abroad, 

That launched a thousand ships, 

And shook the topmost toivers of Ilion, 

passed gently away in guiding and instructing a little 
girl. It seems profanation to add aught to so simple 
and touching a narrative : Manum de tabula. Yet 
something like a general view of Edward Gibbon 
Wakefield's character is necessary. As his niece, 
Mrs Burney, tried to describe him orally to the 
writer, one word was continually on her lips — f com- 
plex.' This suits him well, and is probably what 
Lord Lyttelton had in his mind when he described 
him as ' A man of much vicissitude of fortune and 
much inequality of character.' It does not mean that 
this character was a jumble of conflicting qualities, 
but that it was developed unsymmetrically on the two 
sides which are inseparable from the conception of a 
finite object. Ancient psychology expressed this 
quality by distinguishing between the animal and the 
intellectual soul, the inert groundwork of natural 
instincts and propensities, and the busy impression- 
able mind that soars above. In the first respect, 
Wakefield offers little to censure or regret ; few have 
been more richly endowed with courage, perseverance, 
generosity, affection, or humanity. His faults, such 
2 A 



370 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

as resentment degenerating into rancour, and playful- 
ness into mischief-making, were such as are almost 
inseparable from an opulent nature, exuberant in all 
it brings forth. It was when reason was divorced 
from instinct, and action was entirely directed by the 
speculative intelligence that he sometimes went astray. 
His errors may be summed up in a word — unscrupu- 
lousness. Not unscrupulousness which aims at 
personal advantage, even in the great offence of 
his life, the motive was not love of money, but 
love of influence ; but the unscrupulousness of a 
strong will intolerant of opposition either from men 
or morals, and of a statesmanship which, impatient 
of the jealousies and misunderstandings of inferior 
men, deems it no sin to circumvent where it 
cannot overthrow. If statesmen wielding powerful 
parliamentary majorities are not exempt from insin- 
cerity, if they introduce measures which they have no 
intention of passing, and make professions up to 
which they have no idea of acting, what excuse 
should not be made for a man without fortune, with- 
out station, and the object of general suspicion and 
disapproval, conscious, nevertheless, of magnificent 
aspirations, and full of projects in which he has un- 
bounded faith, but of which he is impotent to realise 
the smallest particle, save by impressing, persuading, 
or cajoling r Add to this necessity of his position an 
unequalled personal fascination, a genius for managing 
men, and the instinct of a born educator, derived from 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 371 

his father and grandmother, and it will not appear so 
extraordinary that a warm-hearted, sanguine man of 
almost extravagantly high spirits should have gained 
the reputation of a cold-blooded schemer and manipu- 
lator of puppets for selfish ends. Mr Gisborne, the 
miniaturist of New Zealand statesmen, who had, 
however, a personal dislike to Wakefield, writes of 
him : * His deceptiveness was ineradicable, and, like 
the fowler, he was ever spreading his nets. Always 
plausible, and often persuasive, he was never simple 
and straightforward. He was calculating and self- 
contained, and had no particle of generous chivalry in 
his nature.' The injustice of this character is mani- 
fest from its inconsistency with the traits most dis- 
tinct in Wakefield's life and writings : yet there is 
this much truth that ' the skilfulness in handling 
puppets in high places,' which Mr Gisborne justly 
attributes to him, was a snare to him. Though the 
handling was not for private but for public ends, the 
puppets no less resented it when it was found out, as 
it could not fail to be. It is undeniable that he wore 
out the goodwill of several successive sets of sup- 
porters ; on the other hand, the persons thus alienated 
were for the most part, comparatively speaking, 
inferior men, and the highest minds evinced the most 
constancy of attachment. Lord Durham and Lord 
Metcalfe might or might not have been estranged 
from him if their lives had been prolonged, but cer- 
tainly gave no sign of estrangement while they lived. 



372 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

Rintoul never once failed him during an intimacy of 
twenty-two years, and Rintoul was a shrewd Scotch- 
man, by no means addicted to excess of sentiment. 
Wakefield's anonymous contributions to his Spectator 
would make a very thick volume. Charles Buller's 
regard survived even his official connection with 
Wakefield's bete noire Earl Grey, and Lord Lyttel- 
ton's the yet more serious trial of Wakefield's break 
with Godley. This grievous misfortune would not 
have occurred if the two had not been at opposite 
sides of the world ; but whatever blame is to be 
ascribed to the men falls principally upon Wakefield, 
one of whose most unfortunate characteristics was an 
unreasonable suspiciousness. His view of human 
nature was anything but morbid, but in matters 
where he did not see his way quite clearly, his active 
imagination conjured up motives, intentions and pro- 
ceedings which had no existence elsewhere. 'The 
surmises, suspicions and impressions expressed by Mr 
Wakefield,' drily remarks Mr Swainson, 'are to be 
received only as surmises, suspicions and impressions.' 
This defect was correlated with the vein of paradox, 
also the offspring of a teeming imagination, which 
runs through his soundest projects and best-considered 
writings, and the exaggerated vehemence with which 
he assails open adversaries and backsliding disciples. 
All that can be said is : no imagination, no origin- 
ality ; and no originality, no place among great men. 
c He is all fault who hath no fault at all? 



EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 373 

If Edward Gibbon Wakefield had not possessed 
the imaginative genius from which some delusions 
and some extravagances are inseparable, it could 
not have been said of him, as was said with perfect 
truth by Thornton Hunt in his obituary notice in 
the Daily Telegraph : ' There is no part of the 
British Empire which does not feel in the actual 
circumstances of the day the effect of Edward 
Gibbon Wakefield's labours as a practical states- 
man ; and perhaps the same amount of tangible 
result in administrative and constructive reform can 
scarcely be traced to the single hand of any other 
man during his own lifetime.' This is true, and 
yet the practical side of Wakefield's work seems 
second to the ideal, the conception of a system 
which methodised the previously irregular and hap- 
hazard attempts at colonization, and made it a 
department of statesmanship ; and perhaps even 
this is less than the new way of regarding the 
relations between the mother country and the 
colonies, of which the system of responsible 
government recommended in Lord Durham's Report 
was the most conspicuous manifestation. Modern 
states, up to quite a recent period, have regarded 
colonies as establishments for the benefit of the 
mother country, and have formed new settlements 
as a tradesman establishes branch shops, with no 
notion of allowing money to accumulate in the 
subsidiary till. The Greeks did not thus ; their 



374 BUILDERS OF GREATER BRITAIN 

colonies were entirely independent ; the Roman 
colonies, though dependent, were never tributary ; 
but the colonies of modern states have usually 
been both, and have only obtained self-govern- 
ment at the cost of long and cruel warfare. The 
idea that a colony does not exist for the mother 
country but for itself is an evident corollary from 
Wakefield's general principles ; and its tacit adop- 
tion since the publication of the Durham Report 
has kept the British Colonial Empire intact, while 
others have crumbled away. c Can one,' he asks, 
' read Gibbon without seeing that the Roman 
Empire fell to pieces because its government was 
a government of mere force, which, when applied 
to a great and diversified empire, is necessarily 
weak because force cannot stretch so far, and be- 
cause there is no attachment in the subjects to- 
wards the central power ? ' 

The Colonial Office wars no longer with Edward 
Gibbon Wakefield j his bust adorns one of its 
corridors, and his spirit in a great degree animates 
its policy. We do not now hear eminent states- 
men denouncing the idea that colonies can con- 
tribute anything to the strength of the mother 
country as c a superstition as dark as any that 
existed in the Middle Ages ' ; or find veteran 
officials discussing in their correspondence how the 
parent can with least violence to her feelings turn 
the daughter out of doors. But while the depart- 



• EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD 375 

ment of ' State which he combated has recognised 
his desert, the colonies which he created have done 
nothing for his memory — absolutely nothing what- 
ever. It cannot be thought that this will long 
continue. The storied urn will not always be 
lacking to Adelaide or the animated bust to Wel- 
lington ; and it must be hoped that the portrait 
of the body will be accompanied by a portrait of 
the mind in the shape of an edition of his prin- 
cipal writings — obsolete, no doubt, as regards many 
of the questions discussed, but still retaining all their 
worth as illustrations of colonial and economical 
history, and capable of firing the enthusiasm of 
many a generation to come. When a monument 
does arise, 'whether in the South Australian capital 
or by the waters of Cook's Strait, it cannot — after 
due acknowledgment of his special achievement as 
founder of the colony — be more fitly inscribed than 
with words adapted from two distinct eulogies by 
Lord Lyttelton, who knew the man and had 
shared in his work : — 

The man in these latter days beyond com- 
parison OF THE MOST GENIUS AND THE WIDEST 
INFLUENCE in the great science of coloniza- 
tion, BOTH AS A THINKER, A WRITER, AND A 
WORKER ; WHOSE NAME IS LIKE A SPELL TO ALL 
INTERESTED IN THE SUBJECT. 



INDEX 



Adderley, C. B. (Lord Norton), 
drafts New Zealand Constitu- 
tion under Wakefield's guid- 
ance, 328, 330. 

Adelaide, city of, founded, 104. 

Allom, Albert, reminiscences of 
New Zealand Company, 217, 
222 } writes down the Art of 
Colonization from Wakefield's 
dictation, 280, 281 5 on 
Wakefield in New Zealand, 

342, 348, 349- 

Allom, Charles, Wakefield's secre- 
tary in Canada, 1845 saves 
his life, 233. 

Allom, Mrs, nurses Wakefield in 
his illness, 233 5 reconciles 
him with Frances Wakefield, 

335- 

Angas, George Fife, 96 ; forms a 
supplementary company for 
South Australian coloniza- 
tion, 103 5 his share in the 
foundation of the colony, 105- 
107 ; his misfortunes and 
ultimate success, 121, note ; 
warns Lord Glenelg of French 
designs on New Zealand, 
151. 

Art of Colonization, 281-285. 

Attwood, Rosabel, friend and cor- 
respondent of Nina Wake- 
field, in. 

Attwood, Thomas, M.P., in 5 
meets Wakefield at Malvern, 
271. 



Auckland, city of, founded, 219. 



B 



Barclay, Robert, of Urie, author 
of the Apology for Quakerism, 
an ancestor of Wakefield's, 3. 

Baring, Francis, impressed by 
Wakefield's evidence on New 
Zealand, 127 ; chairman of 
New Zealand Association, 
142. _ 

Bathurst, Miss, concerned in the 
Turner affair, 33. 

Batman, John, purchases site of 
Melbourne from the natives, 
126, note. 

Brougham, Henry (Lord Broug- 
ham), prosecutes Wakefield 
for the abduction of Ellen 
Turner, 31 ; his animosity 
to Lord Durham, 165, 166 5 
humiliations inflicted by him 
on Lord Melbourne's Govern- 
ment, 171. 

Buller, Charles, assists in Wake- 
field's South Australian pro- 
ject, 93 5 chief secretary to 
Lord Durham in Canada, 
163 ; his character and 
abilities, 164 5 Chief Com- 
missioner of Canadian Crown 
Lands, 169 ; his share in the 
Durham Report, 178, 179 j 
author of Responsible Govern- 
ment for the Colonies, 180 ; his 
motion on New Zealand 



377 



378 



INDEX 



affairs, 256 ; negotiates with 
Sir James Graham, 257 ; 
brings the case of the New 
Zealand Company forward 
in Parliament, 258 5 arranges 
compromise between the 
Company and the Govern- 
ment, 269 5 his character of 
' Mr Mother country,' 287 ; 
his death, 294 j his speech 
on systematic colonization 
reprinted by Wakefield, 295. 

Burney, Mrs D'Arblay, Wake- 
field's niece j her impression 
of him, 321-324, 369. 

Byron, Lord, 21, note. 



Canterbury Settlement founded, 

3"- 

Cargill, Captain, founder of the 
Otago settlement, 303. 

Carlyle, Thomas, 249, 265. 

Coates, Dandeson, lay secretary 
to the Church Missionary 
Society ; his opposition to the 
New Zealand Association, 
136-139. 



D 



Darwin, Charles Robert, on the 
New Zealand missionaries, 
135 ; on transportation to 
New South Wales, 237. 

Davies, Rev. David, father of 
Frances Wakefield, 23. 

Dent, Mr, historian of Canada, 
185, 186. 

Dilke, Sir Charles, 121, note. 

Disraeli, B., his Vivian Grey com- 
pared and contrasted with 
Wakefield's early writings 
24, 25. 

Domett, Alfred, Premier of New 



Zealand ; his character of 
Arthur Wakefield, 228, note. 

Duncombe, Thomas Slingsby, 
M.P., his anecdotes of Wake- 
field in Canada, 174. 

Dunedin, city of, founded, 303. 

Durham, Earl of, becomes a direc- 
tor of the New Zealand 
Association, 142 ; his charac- 
ter, 143 5 at variance with 
Lord Howick, 144 ; com- 
munications with Colonial 
Office, 146 ; becomes chair- 
man of the New Zealand 
Company, 152 5 Governor- 
General of British North 
America, 161 ; his qualifica- 
tions and disqualifications, 

163 5 his choice of advisers, 

164 ; Lord Brougham's ani- 
mosity to him, 165 5 letters 
to Melbourne and Glenelg, 
168, 169 5 his Ordinance 
respecting the treatment of 
the rebel prisoners, 170, 171 5 
resigns and returns home, 
172; his popularity in Canada, 
173; his reception in England, 
174; defended by Stuart Mill, 
175, 176 5 his Report on the 
affairs of Canada, 177-18 1 5 
tutors his successor, 182 5 his 
death and last words, 183. 



Egerton, H. E., historian of 
British colonial policy, 143, 
178. 

Eliot, Lord, chairman of New Zea- 
land Committee of 1840, 244. 

Elliot, Mr, Emigration Commis- 
sioner, 291. 

Elliotson, Dr, 174, note. 

Ellis, William, writer on coloniza- 
tion, 62, note. 

England and America, 75-78. 

Evans, Dr G. S., 138, 139, 150. 



INDEX 



379 



Fitzgerald, J. E., New Zealand 
statesman ; his character of 
Godley, 306 ; his character, 
317 ; forms the first New 
Zealand responsible ministry, 
351 5 resigns, 354 ; his gener- 
osity towards Wakefield's 
memory, 357, note. 

Fitzroy, Admiral, appointed 
Governor of New Zealand, 
227 ; condones massacre of 
Wairau, 230 ; failure and 
recall, 231. 

Flatt, Mr, catechist of the Church 
Missionary Society, 140. 

Foster, Anthony, on the Wake- 
field system in South Aus- 
tralia, 122. 

Freeman, Mrs Harold, Wakefield's 
niece 5 her reminiscences of 
his last days, 362-368. 

Fry, Elizabeth, cousin to Wake- 
field, 12 5 visits him in 
prison, 40. 



Garran's Australian Atlas, 107. 

Gawler, Colonel, Governor of 
South Australia, 120. 

Gibbon, Isabella, Edward Gibbon 
Wakefield's great - grand - 
mother, 3. 

Gipps, Sir George, Governor of 
New South Wales, his land 
policy, 219, 220. 

Gisborne, William, New Zealand 
• historian, on Colonel Wake- 
field, 198 ; on Sir George 
Grey's land policy, 277 ; on 
E. G. Wakefield, 371. 

Gladstone, Right Hon. W. E., 
Wakefield's appeal to on New 
Zealand affairs, 232 j on New 
Zealand Committee of 1840, 
248 5 assists passing of New 



Zealand Constitution Act, 
330; his speech on the 
subject, 331. 

Glenelg, Lord, his weakness as 
Colonial Secretary, 1345 his 
opposition to the New Zea- 
land Company, 148 5 re- 
moved from office, 152 ; 
prevents Wakefield's receiv- 
ing an appointment in Canada, 
167, 169. 

Godley, John Robert, his ante- 
cedents, 272 5 joins Wake- 
field in founding the Canter- 
bury Settlement, 305 •, his 
character, 306 5 organises the 
Canterbury Association, 308 ; 
proceeds to New Zealand, 
310 ; Superintendent of the 
Canterbury Settlement, 311 ; 
misunderstanding with Wake- 
field, 317 5 returns to England, 

334- 

Gouger, Robert, Wakefield's Letter 
from Sydney published under 
his name, 60 5 assists in the 
foundation of South Australia, 
94, 107. 

Grey, Earl (Lord Howick), Under 
Secretary for the Colonies, 
96, 97 5 his character, 144 ; 
misunderstandings with Lord 
Durham and Wakefield, 145 ; 
opposition to New Zealand 
Association, 149, 150 ; un- 
satisfactory interview with 
Wakefield, 233 5 scene be- 
tween him and Wakefield 
before New Zealand Com- 
mittee of 1840, 247, 248 ; 
drafts report of Committee 
of 1845, 253, 2545 adopts 
Sir George Grey's views on 
New Zealand, 273. 

Grey, Sir George, first Governor 
of South Australia, 121 ; 
Governor of New Zealand, 
231 ; prevents the Constitu- 
tion of 1846 from going into 



3 8o 



INDEX 



effect, 273 ; reasons for this I 
step, 274 5 a benefactor to the 
native race, 275 ; his land 
policy, 276-277 5 befriends 
the New Zealand Company, 
278 ; his opinion of Colonel 
Wakefield, 279 5 his hostility 
to the Canterbury Settlement, 
313 ; drafts a constitution for 
New Zealand, 328 5 his cor- 
respondence with Wakefield, 
337-340 ; appointed Governor 
of Cape Colony, 341. 



H 



Hanson, Sir Richard, Chief Justice 
of South Australia, on the 
publication of the Durham 
Report, 177 5 on its author- 
ship, 178. 

Head, John, Wakefield's cousin at 
Ipswich, comforts Wakefield 
in his imprisonment, and takes 
him home, 83. 

Heke, New Zealand chief, 231. 

Henslow, Captain, 333. 

Hill, Sir Rowland, secretary to 
the South Australian Com- 
missioners, 103. 

Hill, William, afterwards Lord 
Berwick, envoy at Turin, 
employs Wakefield, 17 5 his 
advice to him, 19 ; his 
opinion of Mrs Wakefield, 
21. 

Hinds, Samuel, Bishop of Nor- 
wich, supports the New 
Zealand Association, 138 ; 
advocates the proposal of a 
bishop for New Zealand, 145 ; 
revives the idea of coloni- 
zation by religious bodies, 

Hobson, Captain, appointed Lieu- 
tenant - Governor of New 



Zealand, 156 5 arrives in 
New Zealand, 201 ; his in- 
structions from Sir George 
Gipps, 211 5 concludes Treaty 
of Waitangi, 2125 frustrates 
French expedition to Akaroa, 
214 5 his injudicious proclam- 
ation, 2185 founds Auck- 
land, 219 ; his death, 227. 

Hodder, Edwin, 98, 106. 

Hutt, John, Art of Colonization 
dedicated to ; resigns chair- 
manship of Canterbury Asso- 
ciation, 312. 



K 



Kororareka (Russell), town at 
the Bay of Islands ; vigilance 
committee at, 133 ; burned 
by the natives, 231. 



Lancaster, Joseph, Edward 
Wakefield's opinion of, 7, 
note. 

Leroy-Beaulieu, M., on the Wake- 
field system, 288-290. 

Letter from Sydney, 58-61. 

Lowe, Robert (Viscount Sher- 
brooke), opposes New Zea- 
land Constitution Bill, 330. 

Lyttelton, Lord, Wakefield's char- 
acter of, 306 5 rescues the 
Canterbury Settlement from 
failure, 312 ; joins in a 
guarantee to the New Zea- 
land Company, 313 ; aids in 
drafting the New Zealand 
Constitution, 330 ; Wake- 
field wishes him to become 
Governor of New Zealand, 
334; his character of Wake- 
field, 369, 375. 



INDEX 



381 



M 



Martin, Sir William, appointed 
Chief Justice of New Zea- 
land, 224 } on Wakefield's 
illness, 358. 

Melbourne, Lord, his character, 
144 ; his attitude towards 
the New Zealand Associa- 
tion, 147, 148 ; objects to 
appointments of Turton and 
Wakefield, 168 ; weakness 
of -his administration, 171 5 
on the publication of Lord 
Durham's Report, 177. 

Merivale, Herman, on the Wake- 
field system, 71. 

Metcalfe, Sir Charles, Governor- 
General of Canada, 184 5 
Wakefield's eulogium on him, 
186. 

Mill, James, introduced by Edward 
Wakefield to Francis Place, 7. 

Mill, John Stuart, approves of the 
Wakefield system, 88 ; his 
defence of Lord Durham's 
conduct in Canada, 174-176 $ 
his opinion of Wakefield as a 
political economist, 263. 

Molesworth, Sir William, an early 
colonial reformer, 88 5 chair- 
man of Committee on Trans- 
portation, 238 5 his character, 
239 5 his report, 242 5 opposes 
New Zealand Constitution 
Bill, 330. 

Murray, Sir George, Colonial 
Secretary, 96. 



W 



Nayti, alleged New Zealand chief, 

140. 
Nelson, city of, founded, 228. 
Normanby, Marquis of, introduces 

the South Australian Act into 

the House of Lords, 100 ; 

Colonial Secretary, 1525 his 



conduct towards the New 
Zealand Association, 153, 
156. 



O 



Otago settlement founded, 303. 



Pakington, Sir John, Colonial 
Secretary, 331. 

Palmer, Lieutenant-Colonel, South 
Australian Commissioner, 
proposes a monument to 
Wakefield, 123 ; his anecdote 
of Wakefield and the Ameri- 
cans, 365. 

Palmerston, Lord, 202. 

Panizzi, Antonio, aids Brougham 
at the Turner trial, 49. 

Papineau, Canadian rebel leader, 

173. 

Peel, Sir Robert, 256, 259, 260. 

Percy, Hon. Algernon, 22, 33, 
note. 

Place, Francis, his account of 
Edward Wakefield, 6, 7 ; his 
opinion of Edward Gibbon 
Wakefield, 16-19. 

Punishment of Death in the Metro- 
polis, 53-58. 



Quarterly Review on Lord Dur- 
ham's mission to Canada, 
162 ; on his Report, 181. 



R 



Rangihaiatea, New Zealand 

chief, 229. 
Rauparaha, New Zealand chief, 

229, 230. 



382 



INDEX 



Reeves, Hon. W. P., Agent- 
General for New Zealand, 
on the settlement of New 
Zealand by the Company, 
200, 205 ; on the Treaty of 
Waitangi, 214 ; on the 
Taranaki settlement, 229 5 
on the Wakefield system in 
the Canterbury colony, 293. 

Rennie, George, projector of the 
Otago settlement, 302. 

Rice, Right Hon. T. C. Spring 
(Lord Monteagle), 99. 

Rintoul, Robert Stephen, editor of 
the Spectator, one of Wake- 
field's principal supporters, 
88-90 ; Wakefield's letter to 
him from New Zealand, 343- 
348. 

Roebuck, John Arthur, M.P., his 
opposition to Wakefield, 84, 
173, 244. 

Rusden, G. W., New Zealand 
historian, on New Zealand 
land sales, 290. 

Russell, Lord John, as Colonial 
Secretary, 201, 202 ; con- 
cludes an arrangement with 
the New Zealand Company, 
222,223 5 resigns, 223 ; sup- 
ports the claims of the Com- 
pany, 2 55> 2 5 6 - 



Scarlett, Sir James, defends 

Wakefield at Lancaster 

Assizes, 31. 
Schmidt, William, Wakefield's 

servant, 353, 357. 
Selwyn, George Augustus, Bishop 

of New Zealand, 224, 225, 

228, note, 275, 316. 
Sewell, Henry, New Zealand 

statesman, goes out to New 

Zealand with Wakefield, 332; 

his opinion of the colony, 



346 ; enters the Fitzgerald 
ministry, 351 5 resigns, 354. 

Shortland, Lieutenant, 218, 228. 

Sidney, Samuel, on the Wakefield 
system in South Australia, 
122. 

Simeon, Sir John, 313. 

Smith, Adam, Wakefield's edition 
of his Wealth of Nations, 262, 
264. 

Somes, Joseph, M.P., succeeds 
Lord Durham as chairman 
of the New Zealand Com- 
pany, 224. 

Sped ding, James, reviews report 
of South Australian Com- 
mittee in Edinburgh Revietv, 
121, note. 

Stanley, Captain Owen, anticipates 
the French at Akaroa, 213. 

Stanley, Lord, Colonial Secretary, 
his hostility to the New Zea- 
land Company, 223, 249, 250, 
257 5 resigns, 260. 

Stephen, Sir James, Under Secre- 
tary for the Colonies, 134, 
249, 287. 

Stow, J. P., on the Wakefield 
system in South Australia, 
122. 

Swainson, William, appointed 
Attorney - General of New 
Zealand, 2245 on the first 
New Zealand Parliament, 
355 ; frustrates the introduc- 
tion of responsible govern- 
ment, 356. 

Swan River Settlement, failure of, 
85-88. 

'Swing' incendiary fires, 80, 81. 



Taylor, Sir Henry, reviews 
Spedding's article on South 
Australia Committee, 121, 
note ; his opinion of Lord 
John Russell as Colonial 



INDEX 



333 



Secretary, 222, note ; on Earl 
Grey, 232. 

Thierry, Baron de, his claims to 
land in New Zealand, 151. 

Thomson, C. Poulett (Lord Syden- 
ham), Governor-General of 
Canada, 182. 

Thomson, Surgeon - Major, his 
Story of New Zealand, 131 5 on 
the earthquake at Wellington, 
362, note. 

Titchfield, Marquis of, Wakefield's 
published letter to, 24. 

Torlesse, Catherine, Wakefield's 
sister, letters to, 42 and 
passim. 

Torlesse, Rev. Charles, Wake- 
field's brother-in-law, 41 ; 
letters from Wakefield to, 
128, 252. 

Torrens, Colonel, on the Wake- 
field system, 90 5 one of the 
founders of South Australia, 

95, 97, 107. 
Turner, Ellen, her abduction, 29- 

32. 
Turton, Sir Thomas. 164. 



Vogel, Sir Julius, 293. 



W 

Wairau massacre, 229, 230. 

Wakefield, Arthur (brother of 
Edward Gibbon Wakefield), 
128, wore,- on the colonization 
of New Zealand, 129 ; founds 
settlement of Nelson, 225 5 
Bishop Selvvyn and Mr 
Domett's opinion of him, 
228, note; murdered by the 
natives, 229 ; eulogised by 
House of Commons, 252. 

Wakefield, Daniel (brother of 
Edward Gibbon Wakefield), 



drafts South Australian Act, 
105 5 judge in New Zealand, 
109, note; on his brother 
Edward Gibbon's illness, 358 5 
resides with him, 362 5 his 
death, 365. 

Wakefield, Daniel (uncle of 
Edward Gibbon Wakefield), 
41, note, in, note. 

Wakefield, Edward (grandfather of 
Edward Gibbon Wakefield), 

3, 4- 
Wakefield, Edward (father of 
Edward Gibbon Wakefield), 
birth, 4 5 marriage and early 
occupations, 5 ; his acquaint- 
ance with Francis Place, 6-8 5 
his active philanthropy, 9 ; his 
work on Ireland, 10, 11 5 his 
relations with his son, 14-18 ; 
marriage with Frances Davies, 
23 5 seeks a seat in Parlia- 
ment, 34. 
Wakefield, Edward Gibbon, birth 
and early education, 13 ; at 
Westminster School, 14 ; 
obtains diplomatic employ- 
ment, 15 ; letter in the 
Statesman newspaper, 18 ; 
elopes with Eliza Susan 
Pattle, 19-20 5 marriage, 21 5 
loses his wife, 22 5 diplomatic 
appointment at Paris, 23 5 
early political writings, 23- 
27 ; his abduction of Ellen 
Turner, 29-31 5 sentenced to 
three years' imprisonment, 
32 5 motive of the abduction, 
33, 34 5 l etters from Lan- 
caster Castle, 36, 37 ; from 
Newgate, 39-45 5 his book on 
The Punishment of Death, 53- 
585 his Letter from Sydney, 
58-61 ; his system of coloniza- 
tion, 62-73 5 his description 
of an Italian girl, 74-75 5 his 
England and America, 75- 
78 ; his tract on ' Swing,' 
80-82 ; released from prison, 



3 8 4 



INDEX 



83 ; aids in establishing the 
Colonization Society, 85 ; his 
friendship with Rintoul, 89 ; 
promotes the settlement of 
South Australia, 92-102 ; the 
chief founder of the colony, 
104 - 107 5 death of his 
daughter Nina, 116 - 119 5 
projects the colonization of 
New Zealand, 126-129 ; his 
alliance with Lord Durham, 
143-144 5 his misunderstand- 
ings with Lord Howick, 145 ; 
replies to Mr Dandeson 
Coates, 147 ; hastens the 
despatch of the Tory to 
New Zealand, 154; his 
agenda for meeting of the 
New Zealand Company, 155 5 
adviser of Lord Durham in 
his Canadian mission, 163 5 
arrives in Canada, 167 ; his 
appointment as Commissioner 
of Crown Lands frustrated by 
the Colonial Office, 168, 169 ; 
Lord Durham's high estimate 
of his advice, 170 ; returns to 
England, 172 5 sends Lord 
Durham's Report for publica- 
tion by the Times, 177 5 his 
share in its composition, 178, 
179 5 subsequent visits to 
Canada, 183 j elected to the 
Canadian legislature, 1845 
his character of Sir Charles 
Metcalfe, 186 5 essay on 
colonial politics in Fishers 
Colonial Magazine, 187-190 5 
his grief at the death of his 
brother Arthur, 191 ; drafts 
instructions for the colonizing 
expedition to New Zealand, 
192 ; on reserves of land for 
the benefit of the natives, 
209, 210; virtual manager 
of the New Zealand Com- 
pany, 224 ; scheme for 
Church Endowment in New 
Zealand, 225, 226 ; his over- 



tures to Mr Gladstone, 232 ; 
quarrel with Earl Grey, and 
serious illness, 233 5 organises 
Committee on Transportation, 
2385 evidence before Colonial 
Lands Committee, 243-245 ; 
his system approved by South 
Australian Committee, 245, 

246 5 evidence before New- 
Zealand Committee of 1840, 

247 5 controversies with Lord 
Stanley, 249-260 5 memoir 
on New Zealand affairs, 261 ; 
edits The Wealth of Nations, 
262-264 5 Popular Politics, 
264 5 his address to the elec- 
tors of Birmingham, 265 ; 
loses, through illness, his 
control over the New Zea- 
land Company, 269 5 resigns 
his directorship, 270 5 his 
portrait painted by subscrip- 
tion, 270 ; his convalescence 
at Malvern, 271 ; acquaint- 
ance with J. R. Godley, 272 ; 
writes The Art of Colonization 
at Boulogne, 279, 280 ; char- 
acter of the book, 281-285 ; 
on colonization by religious 
bodies, 300, 301 ; scheme 
originally proposed by him in 
1843, 301, 302 5 The Founders 
of Canterbury, 304, 305 ; his 
share in the establishment of 
the Canterbury Settlement, 
308 ; joins in guarantee to 
the New Zealand Company, 
3135 estrangement from 
Godley, 317 ; on procuring 
a bishop for the colony, 
318 j letters to emigrants, 
319, 3205 his niece, Mrs 
Burney's, reminiscences of 
him, 321-324; recollections 
by Sir Frederick Young, 
324-327 ; founds Colonial 
Reform Society, 327 5 aids in 
drafting the New Zealand 
Constitution, 328 ; petitions 



INDEX 



385 



Parliament in its favour, 332, 
333 5 sails for New Zealand, 
333 ; his farewell letter to 
Lord Lyttelton, 333, 334 ; his 
reconciliation with Frances 
Wakefield, 335 5 arrives in 
New Zealand, 336 ; his 
correspondence with Sir 
George Grey, 337"34° i 
plunges into New Zealand 
politics, 342 5 his letter to 
Rintoul, 343-348 5 elected 
to the first New Zealand 
Parliament, 350 5 moves a 
resolution in favour of re- 
sponsible government, 351 5 
the Governor's confidential 
adviser, 354 5 retirement 
from this position, 356 ; criti- 
cism of his conduct, 357, 
358; serious illness, 359, 
361 ; retires into private life, 
361 5 his niece, Mrs Free- 
man's, reminiscences of his 
last days, 361 - 368 5 his 
death, 368 ; his character, 
369-372 5 his services, 373- 
374 5 memorial due to him, 

375- . , 

Wakefield, Edward Jernmgham 
(son of Edward Gibbon Wake- 
field), his birth, 22 ; goes out 
to New Zealand, 154; his 
Adventures in Ne%u Zealand^ 
217 5 his father's opinion of 
him, 342, 343 5 account of 
his father's illness, 359, 361. 
Wakefield, Eliza Susan (wife of 
Edward Gibbon Wakefield), 
elopes with him, 19, 20 ; Mr 
Hill's character of her, 21 ; 
her death, 22. 
Wakefield, Frances, marriage to 
Edward Wakefield, 23 5 tried 
as an accomplice in the 
Turner abduction, 31 ; Wake- 
field's letters to her from 
Lancaster Castle, 36, 37 ; 
reconciled to him, 335. 



Wakefield, Felix, on the Canter- 
bury Settlement, 315, 316. 
Wakefield, Nina (Susan Priscilla) 
(daughter of Edward Gibbon 
Wakefield), her birth, 22 ; 
letters on South Australian 
Colonization, 108-1165 ill- 
ness and death, 116-119. 

Wakefield, Priscilla (grand- 
mother of Edward Gibbon 
Wakefield), marriage, 3 ; 
founder of savings banks, 4 ; 
on her grandson, Edward 
Gibbon, 13, 14 5 his letter to 
her from Newgate, 39-42. 

Wakefield, Susan (mother of 
Edward Gibbon Wakefield), 5. 

Wakefield, William, Colonel 
(brother of Edward Gibbon 
Wakefield), assists in the ab- 
duction of Ellen Turner, 29 ; 
tried and sentenced to three 
years' imprisonment, 31, 32 ; 
military service in Portugal, 
129 ; proceeds to New Zea- 
land as chief agent of the New 
Zealand Company, 1535 his 
character, 197-199; his ex- 
tensive land purchases, 203- 
205 ; founds Wellington, 
217 ; his account of the 
Wairau massacre, 229, 230 5 
arranges disputes between 
the Company and the 
settlers, 278 5 his sudden 
death, 278 5 Sir George 
Grey's opinion of him, 279. 

Ward, Sir Henry George, chairman 
of the Committee on Colonial 
Lands, 125 5 moves resolu- 
tions on the subject, 221. 

Westminster School, 14. 

Wellington, city of, founded, 217. 

Wellington, Duke of, procures 
the passage of the South 
Australian Act, 100 ; the 
city of Wellington named 
after him, 218. 

Whately, Archbishop, 243. 



2 B 



386 



INDEX 



Williams, Henry, Archdeacon, 
212, 275. 

Wynyard, Colonel, Acting Gover- 
nor of New Zealand, 350, 
352, 354, 35 6 - 



Young, Sir Frederick, his reminis- 
cences of Wakefield, 324- 
3*7- 



THE END 



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